How to Sell Your House By Owner without a Realtor

Should You Sell Your Home on Your Own?

Most homeowners choose to sell their homes through Realtors because of said individuals’ real estate expertise and experience. However, it is important to remember that you can choose the FSBO option instead, which means selling your home on your own. Since each option has its fair share of advantages and disadvantages, you may actually be able to get better results by selling without a Realtor so long as you meet the right conditions.

First, selling a home can be a complicated and time-consuming process, meaning that you need to be able to put in the time and effort needed to do a thorough job. Second, you need to be prepared to do your research since there is a wealth of information out there that you can use to guide your efforts. So long as you can meet these two conditions, you should seriously consider the FSBO option as an alternative to hiring a real estate agent, not least because there will be no need to pay someone a percentage of the proceeds as a commission.

Preparations

Your first step should be making sure that your home is ready to sell, which means nothing more and nothing less than making it into a place where other people would want to live.

Generally speaking, if you have some money to spend, you should invest it into your home in the form of small repairs and renovations, which can more than make up for their cost by increasing the proceeds from the sale. You should focus on your landscaping, which has a crucial role in making the first impression, as well as your bedroom, your bathroom, and your kitchen, which see the most use. Please note that you should avoid anything that is either too expensive or too time-consuming. Instead, focus on things such as fixing cracks, installing energy-efficient features, and giving your rooms a fresh coat of neutral-colored paint, which have broad appeal but remain relatively inexpensive.

Once you have finished repairing and renovating your home, you need to make sure that you are prepared to show it to people. In broad strokes, this means making it seem warm and welcoming, while also removing small details that can interfere with the potential buyer’s ability to imagine themselves living in it. This is the reason that some home sellers like to bake cookies before showing their homes. Likewise, this is the reason that home sellers tend to remove photos, trophies, and other personal mementos that personalize their homes.

Finally, before you start marketing your home to potential buyers, you need to figure out a price range for your home. You can do so by getting a skilled and reliable appraiser to appraise your home. However, you can also get a rough estimate of your home’s value by using Trulia, Zillow, and similar sites to search for the sale prices of similar homes in similar neighborhoods. The stronger the similarities, the more accurate the information collected in this manner.

Marketing

Before you start marketing your home, you need to have some idea about who exactly you are targeting with your marketing materials. This is important because it will let you tailor your marketing materials for maximum appeal to your potential buyers instead of aiming at all real estate consumers out there to the detriment of all such efforts. If you are not sure what kind of person would want to live in your home, you may want to take a stroll through your neighborhood so that you can catch up with your neighbors. Chances are good that you will find the most success with your marketing materials by appealing to people like them rather than other segments of the real estate market.

Once you have decided whom you are going to market towards, you need to figure out how you are going to market to them. Generally speaking, you should be able to find the most potential buyers in the shortest period of time possible by casting the furthest nest, which means using more than one marketing method. For example, the classifieds section of the newspaper might have fallen out of favor with the popularization of the Internet, but it remains a useful tool even in the Digital Age. Similarly, you should not hesitate to make use of the Internet’s unprecedented reach, not when it is home to useful sites such as Trulia, Zillow, Craiglist, and Postlets. Finally, you should make sure that your home is included on your local MLS in exchange for a flat fee since it sees so much use from real estate agents searching for the right home for their clients’ needs and circumstances.

When you are working on your listing, you need to think about what your intended readers want to hear. However, this does not mean praising your home throughout the content. Instead, you should strive to anticipate your intended readers’ questions so that you can provide them with genuinely useful and informative answers. This is important because it starts your relationship with your potential buyers on open and honest footing, which can make the subsequent negotiations that much easier for you. Speaking of which, you should make good use of photos in your listing because a picture can convey information with much more efficiency than text. Better still, they can even serve as proof of the claims made in the listing, which makes them useful for building trust.

Negotiation

If someone is interested in your home, you can expect to receive an offer once they have thought it through. Please note that this part of the process is a negotiation, meaning that you should not hesitate to send a counter-offer if you feel that the sale price is too low or that the sale conditions are too strict. For that matter, you should not hesitate to walk away if you are feel that you are not going to get your minimally acceptable sale price since there are other potential buyers out there.

Speaking of which, you should not take someone seriously as a potential buyer just because they have sent you an offer. You need to make sure that they are capable of living up to their promises because you will have wasted a lot of time and effort if it turns out in the end that they cannot actually pay what they are supposed to pay in exchange for your home. The simplest and most straightforward method is confirming that their mortgage pre-approval letters are real since mortgage lenders tend to put a fair amount of time and effort into checking their borrowers’ creditworthiness. However, you should also ask for proof of funds and proof of income because there have been cases in which mortgage companies were sloppy with their approval process.

Of course, even if you are sure that a potential buyer can be trusted, you should still take the proper precautions to protect your interests in case something unexpected comes up. For example, you will need a title company, which will provide you with title insurance, maintain the escrow account, and even conduct the closing. Generally speaking, you should choose a title company that has been operating in your area for years and years because length of operation suggests that they have a consistent record of pleasing their clients. However, you should also check their reviews with a site such as the Better Business Bureau to see what their past clients actually thought of them. Pay particularly close attention to complaints as well as how they handled their complaints since that will tell you a great deal about their real level of commitment to their clients.

Once you have chosen your title company, you should be prepared to do everything that your contract says that you have to do, whether that means paperwork or otherwise. Furthermore, you should be prepared to handle the buyer’s precautions to protect their interests. For example, chances are good that they will be conducting a final inspection of their own to make sure that your home is really right of them, which is why you need to be prepared for said inspection as well as the subsequent negotiations if the buyer is unsatisfied. You should not hesitate to ask other people for assistance if you are curious about any step in the closing process. Asking the representatives of your title company is one option, but you can also hire a real estate attorney to represent you in these matters.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

If you choose to sell your house by owner, you need to avoid the most common mistakes if you want to get the best results out of the process. Here are some examples:

• Selling a home is a complicated and time-consuming process in which even small missteps can lead to serious frustration. As a result, you should not rush into things but always maintain an attitude of care and caution. In practice, this means never accepting something without thinking it over, always taking the proper precautions, and never being blinded by something that sounds too good to be true. Even though a slower, more careful approach means that you will have to wait longer for your home to sell, it does minimize your risks in a way that nothing else can.
• You should never spend too much money on repairing and renovating your home in preparation for selling without a Realtor. The more repairs and renovations that you carry out, the smaller the chance that the next one will pay off as an investment. Furthermore, it is possible to renovate a home so much that it stands out compared to other homes in its neighborhood, which is actually counter-productive because it clashes with the expectations of the people who want to live in said neighborhood.
• Setting the right sale price means striking a careful balance. Too high, and the home will take a long time to sell if it sells at all. In contrast, too low, and you will lose out on part of the sum that you could have earned with your home. This is the reason that you should take such care to get a good estimate of your home’s worth. If you cannot find sale prices for similar homes in similar neighborhoods, be sure to get a professional appraisal done so that you can set a sale price for your home that will sell.
• Most people feel some sense of attachment to their homes, so it should come as no surprise to learn that a lot of homeowners can be overly sentimental when it comes to selling them. If you feel that your emotions are getting the better of you while you are negotiating with potential buyers, take a break to calm down before you get back to it.
• If there are any potential issues with your home, you need to make sure that you disclose them to your buyer. After all, it is your responsibility as the homeowner to make sure that your home can actually provide what you are promising them. Besides, if you fail to reveal potential issues, that can cause your negotiations to fall through because of your buyer’s violated sense of trust. In some cases, it can even cost you a lot of money to fix the problem to your buyer’s satisfaction.

Final Considerations

If there is something that you do not know about selling a home FSBO-style without a Realtor, you should look it up using the Internet. After all, you are following in the footsteps of a lot of homeowners by choosing to sell your house by owner, meaning that there is a lot of information out there for those interested in looking for it. In this as in other things, research is essential to ensuring that you make all the right moves in the home selling process, particularly if you have never done anything like it before. However, even if you have no experience with real estate whatsoever, you should be fine so long as you are willing to put in the time and effort needed to learn.