Anyone have experience with selling your home "by owner"?

[MommyPoppins]

We are going to be putting our house up for sale within the next couple of months and with realtors charging 7% We'd like to be able to keep that money in OUR pockets if we can. The market is REALLY hot right now, a realtor would sell our house within a week probably, so we should be able to find a buyer on our own..what do you think? Anyone done this, how did it work out? Was it too much trouble? thanks.

 

[chrissyk]

We are going to be putting our house up for sale within the next couple of months and with realtors charging 7% We'd like to be able to keep that money in OUR pockets if we can. The market is REALLY hot right now, a realtor would sell our house within a week probably, so we should be able to find a buyer on our own..what do you think? Anyone done this, how did it work out? Was it too much trouble? thanks.

I've done it twice myself and my sister has done it twice for herself and once for our grandmother. I would NEVER sell any other way!!! It's actually very simple to do, so don't let any realtors tell you differently. They don't protect you, BTW. A LAWYER does that, and you'll want one of those either way. Feel free to PM me if you want any help/ideas on how to sell your FSBO. BTW, now is a good time to sell IMHO...the interest rates are going up, and that has helped to weed out the looky-loos from the serious buyers.

 

[Rafiki Rafiki Rafiki]

We had a heated discussion on this topic about 3 weeks ago...you may do a search for "Realtor" to try and find it.

We sold our last house FSBO and would have purchased FSBO had there been any houses available by owner when we moved to our current home. Next year, we will sell by owner again.

Having said that, I have about 6 years of mortgage lending experience, and I have seen just about every strange home purchase glitch you could think of...so doing it this way is probably a little easier for me.

If you're going to do it on your own, do lots of reading and protect yourself where necessary. People pay realtors because they take the heat for costly mistakes. Good luck!

 

[C.Ann]

For me, having a realtor deal with all of the headaches and glitches is money well spent.. Not just "any' realtor though - but someone I have been close friends with for many, many years and has an outstanding reputation for sales and service..

I don't want ANYTHING to do with it - LOL.. Just take me to the lawyers office, let me sign the papers, and give me the money!!

 

[ZachnElli]

I did it with our first house and I was only 23 and didn't know anything about real estate. I hired a lawyer whose add I saw in the paper, paid him $500 and he handled all the paperwork. I just showed the house. I was in a hot neighbor hood at the time and the longest time on the market was 30 days. I sold it in 3!!! I had an open house on a Sat and Sunday and had an offer by Monday! And I sold it for $3,000 more than the three realtors I interviewed were willing to list it at! If your neighborhood is hot, give it a month, that's what I told myself and it worked out.

 

[Oh Kay!]

Have you tried to negotiate the commision? When the listing is scarce, the brokers are more open to accepting a lower fee. I don't think anybody pays 7% nowadays, at least not around here. In fact, there was even an article about that on the Real Estate Section of The New York Times.

 

[golfgal]

We have done both FSBO and used a realtor and the only way I would use a realtor again is if we had to leave town before our house was sold. Even in a slow market FSBO is a good idea in my opinion. You can list your house a bit under market value and still come out ahead if you consider the realtor fees. We always use a real estate atty to draw up all the paperwork and have never had a problem. If we have to move again for DH's job we will most definitely sell FSBO.

 

[Toby'sFriend]

All of our moves have been job relocations where my husband's company paid the Realtor fees. Honestly, I am apparently REALLY lousy at picking out Realtors because we have had some real nutcases for both of our house sales.

If you have a semblence of financial and analytical skills, I would say do it yourself and get a Lawyer to review the contracts. There is so much information available on the Internet now regarding comparable prices.

 

[kpm76]

We sold our condo ourselves and it was super easy. We have a top notch real estate attorney who also happens to be a close family friend so he really protected our interests. As another poster stated, it's the attorney that protects you, not the agent. The agent may make things easier and less work for you (they should given the amount of money they make in commission) but you want to make sure you have a good attorney, not just any attorney but one that is specifically a real estate attorney. Spread the word to family and friends that you are selling and tell them to pass the word along to anyone they know that might be interested. You'd be surprised how word of mouth can really help. We did that and it just so happened that my mom's friend's sister was looking for a condo in the complex we were in but had gone to several open houses and didn't like any of the units. She visited our's, made an offer, we excepted and it was a done deal. No offense to anyone who is a real estate agent, but DH and I had several bad experience with agents during our 8 month house hunt. I don't have a high opinion of most of them we met. They tried to convince us we NEEDED a buyer's agent and we were stupid to be going into the market ourselves even though we had spent months reading and researching buying and selling. I could go on and on with our experiences in the last year, but it all worked out in the end for us and I wish you the best