How To Sell Your Home Without An Agent

Home sellers have different reasons for wanting to sell their own home.  Most want to save money, some have had a bad experience with an agent.  The reason doesn’t matter.  If you want to sell your home without an agent, you need to know it’s not difficult as long as you can keep your emotions out of it and stick with tried and true marketing strategies. There are three key principles to selling anything that certainly apply to selling your home.

The first area you need to research and strategize is pricing.  If you do everything right but get the price too high, it will all be for nothing.  You may think that buyers will negotiate with you, and they will if you are close, but only a very few will dare if you are too high.  Agents will negotiate all day long, but in an owner to owner transaction, it’s different.  Overprice your home, and you come across as unrealistic, and no one wants to waste their time negotiating with someone like that, so they move on to the next home, often without even calling, visiting the home or talking with the owner.   Which leads us to the second key to selling your own home; exposure.

Buyers that are actively looking for a home should run into your advertising everywhere they look.  On top of that, your advertising needs to be professional.  A hardware store fsbo sign and a plain ad with a bland photo will get you passed by.  Agents spend big bucks on professional signage, quality advertising and professional staging and photos.  If you want to keep their commission, (it’s your equity already) you’ll have the best shot if your marketing looks professional.

The third and final aspect of marketing that you need to know is the timing in your marketplace.  What is real estate doing in your price range?  What are the average market times?  How many homes sold in your area and price range in the last two months?  Without this critical information, you are throwing darts while blindfolded.  The average for sale by owner home seller only hangs in there for about a month, and this is why.  With no idea what to expect in response to their marketing, it’s easy to get discouraged.

For more in-depth information on these three keys to selling your home without an agent, sign up and login to access the premium content in our members only area of By Owner University.  Start with the 9 page, full color, e-booklet called “Three Keys to Selling Your Own Home”.  Avoid the common mistakes that other “By Owner” sellers make and understand what it takes to successfully attract a buyer.