For sale by owner- have you done it?

billiburrows

Hi! We are under contract for a house and need to get our current home on the market soon. I am seriously considering listing it for sale by owner. have you done this? if so, any advice?

kris356

We have bought FSBO and try to sell FSBO. My advice? Don't do it. It is a serious pain in the arse and when issues arose I would have liked it a whole lot better to just have an agent deal with it when we bought. We have also had two buyers flake on sales. We are listing our house next month with an agent.

4EvR&4AlWz

We put our house on the market FSBO (had it listed on MLS and offered 3% buyers agent commission...if you don't do that, good luck getting people through) last March but we had no date as to when our new house would be finished so we had time.  We were on the market for 2 months with a good number of visits but we weren't able to get that good offer on the table (we got 2 offers but 1 wanted to close in 3 weeks and we didn't even have a date for our new house...the offer was a bit lower than what we wanted so we turned it down.  The other one was also lower than we wanted and also had a contingency for selling their house (it had been on the market for a while already) and we also weren't close to being ready to move into the new house so we declined that one too).

Once we had a date our house would be ready and we could move in, we went with a real estate agent.  She definitely brought more traffic and 2nd looks and agents through and we had an offer in 6 weeks...a week after we moved into the new house.  We also had the house closed on less than 4 weeks after the offer.  I do think our agent facilitated getting the offer and negotiated a good result for our house.

If you're already under contract for a house, don't do FSBO (unless you don't care about 2 mortgages, 2 water/gas/sewage/electric bills).  You run that risk of taking forever (unless you don't care about having 2 homes).  You are entering into a time frame where houses will be popping on the market left and right and you want people coming through yours.  Unless you already have interest in the pipeline from friends so you only have to pay a real estate attorney to do paperwork reviews, you will not have agents bringing people through.  So you should be offering at least 3% commission and even pushed it to 3.5% buyers agent before we switched to an agent for us.  An agent will help bring people in and bring in offers.  I really feel like we would've sold sooner if we had an agent at the beginning but we also went on the market almost 4 months before our house was ready.

We also had a few issues dealing with out of state buyers and their agent prepped the HUD wrong so our agent had to correct it.  There was a delay in getting documents in from out of state.  It was really nice to have the agent take care of everything.  It would've been a major headache to have had to deal with it.  

kris356

I also want to add, we had an amazing real estate attorney who found all sorts of issues on our deed and we also have a gas lease and utility right-of-ways that we were unaware of that they found. He was pricey but he is also my dad's attorney and one of my parents' best friends so there was no way we weren't going to use him when we bought. But when the issues arose(these plus with the inspection), we had to talk to the owner and deal with them ourselves. It would have been awesome to have an agent do it for us because it becomes to "personal" if that makes sense.

We didn't use him when we were selling and the one we did use never would have pointed any of these things out. They strictly were doing the paperwork at our direction.

billiburrows

thanks for the info! you bring up a lot of good points. 

seems like we would save paying some % of commission like 2-3% BUT it may take longer to sell and at that point it would sort of be a wash (ie 3 months extra mortgage payments on the house=the commission) and we would have the headache of doing it ourselves when we really don't know what we are doing....  

kris356

Agents are definitely worth the price.