Selling Your Home Yourself? Uh, Uh--Think Twice!

 What You Need to Know About
“For Sale By Owner” (FSBO) Home Selling

For-Sale-By-Owner (FSBO) sales declined to 10 percent of sales transactions in 2011, down from 14% of sales in 2003, according to the National
Association of Realtors (NAR):

Statistics show that 40 percent of FSBO sales occur when the seller knows the buyer, since a real estate agent is not usually needed in those types of transactions. Small towns and resort areas tend to have the highest rates of FSBO sales, with only 7 percent of suburban area transactions being FSBOs.

Typically FSBO sellers have lower median incomes and are more often singles especially single males. Every home seller must eventually decide whether to hire a
REALTOR® or to sell the home on their own. But even after they decide to go
solo, FSBOs can still be convinced to use a REALTOR®'s expertise.

In NAR’s Profile of Buyers and Sellers you'll find dozens of articles, books, videos, studies, statistics and Web sites to help you find out who FSBOs are and how to work with them. We’ve also included many statistics and tips from the FSBO pages of About.com. Here below we’ve collected the best of them for you.

Most Important Reasons
for Selling a Home As a FSBO (From NAR)

Did not want to pay commission fee: 37%
Sold it to a relative / friend / neighbor: 27%
Buyers contacted seller directly: 16%
Agent was unable to sell home: 8%
Did not want to deal with an agent: 8%
Seller has a real estate license: 2%
Could not find agent to handle transaction: 1%
Other: 2%

Tactics of FSBO Sellers to Market Home

Listing on Internet . . .  33%
Friends/neighbors . . ..  27%
Open house . . . . . . .   19%
Newspaper ad . . . . . .  17%
FSBO Web site . .         12%
Other ........................09%

Marketing Your FSBO Home

(Follow these and many more helpful hints found at
About.com)Read the article, “The Vanishing FSBO” by Robert
Freedman:

With all the money you will be saving over hiring an agent, spend a big chunk on advertising. Figure out your target audience and get the message to them.

Choose several or all of these house marketing tips, from how to do photographs, print advertising, direct mail and e-flyers to hosting tours.

All marketing should be geared toward making your phone ring and increasing traffic to your home.

Avoid marketing mistakes by being flexible with showings, offering incentives to buyers and obtaining buyer feedback...

Read the Rest of the article here.

But First a Few Words of Caution:

1. Do you make more money by selling your home yourself? (See excerpts below)

No. In 2004, the last year NAR did FSBO comparison studies, the median price of
FSBO-sold homes was 15.4 percent lower, when compared to the price of agent-sold homes. Thus, people who want to save money by not having an agent are actually losing money, not saving it.

After all, it is what you GET, or NET, that counts when selling a home; not
what you SAVE. Agents can show your home to more people and thus often have
people competing for your home, which ups the price.

2. Many pitfalls await FSBO sellers today that weren’t there before.

a. A bewildering array of complexities and arcane paperwork is required.

b. Buyers are more inclined to sue FSBO sellers if something was not disclosed
beforehand.

c. It requires a tremendous amount of time to sell a home yourself; you are
almost always on call.

d. Great property risk is involved. People who are skilled at theft during home
showings and open houses may steal your goods from your home. You have to keep EVERYTHING valuable all locked up all the time.

e. Great personal bodily risk is involved. You will be routinely letting
strangers come in contact with you and your family members, out of sight of the
street, and capable of locking you inside your own home and taking over--or even
KILLING you. Is that really worth it?

“If you still want to sell your home yourself, go ahead, but it might be worth
re-reading the above.

However, if you DO go ahead and try to sell your home “for sale by owner”,
call me ANYWAY, and I will give you some pointers that are specific to YOUR particular needs, and thus are not shown here.

I do this because The National Association of Realtors reports that the majority of for sale by owners, up to 80 percent, end up listing with a Realtor.

I figure it this way---if I help you try your hand with a FSBO, you might then choose me when you decide to quit.

Debbie Ferrari, South Orange County Realty Broker | 949-463-4111 | Debbie@DebbieFerrai.com