For Sale By Owner? Maybe not.
16 Dec2008
Filed Under Selling · Tagged: for sale by owner, FSBO · Print This Article
Ten percent. Does that sound like a lot? That is the average amount of money you will lose if you sell your home without an agent. Your agent’s fee will be six percent of the sale of your home. But owners who sell on their own sell their home for 16% less, on average, than sellers who use an agent. Yep, that’s a difference of 10%
Owners who work without an agent cannot get the web presence. Here at Amybsells.com, we focus first on web presence and can offer you the best web coverage for your listing. It is the number one best way to sell your home!
Also, owners do not know how to appropriately price their home or how to negotiate that price with buyers. When you do something outside your core competency you pay top dollar for amateur results!
Some buyers will chose to use “limited service” agents to help them sell their home by owner. But a study by two instructors at Texas University found that sellers get very little net gain when they use these limited-service agents to perform some (not all) of the tasks needed to close on a home sale.
This study also found that these listings took 17.1 percent longer to sell than agented listings. But the bottom line is, for-sale-by-owner offers you no dollar advantage.
FSBO homes are likely not marketed effectively or professionally. These sellers typically rely on yard signs and word of mouth. Some also use newspaper advertisements, open houses, and a few use direct mail.
But fewer than one in five used an internet listing. This is not helpful when considering 77% of buyers house-hunt on the web!
Buyers want an online listing with photos, detailed information, virtual tools, maps and neighborhood info. They like to be fully informed before they drive out to the listing or schedule a showing. Many buyers go see a home because of something that caught their attention in the online listing. People visit Realtor.com (the NAR site) most often nationally. Around here, people use cincymls.com. But you have to have an agent to get listed on most sites, or pay for those limited-service agents who offer a web listing.
FSBO sellers also report having more difficulty understanding the enormous amounts of paperwork, prepping their home for the market and dealing with setting the sales price. This is a greater obstacle than even attracting buyers to the listing in the first place.
A major key to getting a good sale is listing the home at the right price. Sellers are more successful at this with professional help! Agents have knowledge of the market that amateur sellers just can’t match!
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