Selling FSBO

With the way information is so easily obtained online nowadays, you can get access to a lot of information by just doing some basic searches. A number of people consider selling their house "For Sale By Owner" or abbreviated FSBO. A lot of people want to save on the commission, and we don't blame them. It's the largest cost of selling a home. But below, we'll cover some of the reasons why a real estate professional adds value to a transaction.

Automatic Valuation Models (AVM)

You can utilize resources that will give you estimates of how much your home is worth in mere seconds. These websites have complex algorithms that they use to generate their estimates, but how accurate are they? What don't they take into account?

There are several things that these models can't account for. Namely: your particular home, how your home is different than the neighbors home, the upgrades that may have been done on your home, the local market conditions, what you will use as your initial listing price, whether you'll get multiple offers or not, and countless many other local factors that a knowledgeable real estate professional can help you with.

Specifics of Your Home

Your home is different than the the rest of the homes around it. Let's face it, homes are really individual and there are really no two homes that are alike. This is true even if they share the same floor-plan. They may differ in the paint colors, or the quality of the appliances, or even the current condition. Each of these differences affects the pricing of your home and ultimately how much it well sell for. That's where we come into play. We will compare your specific home to the others nearby and make determinations of the differences. From that, we can account for the differences and how that affects buyers and how much more or less they are willing to pay for specific differences.

Local Factors of Your Home

AVM models also can't take into account specific local considerations for your specific home. For instance, in every neighborhood, there are specific streets that divide the neighborhoods up into localized higher value areas and lower value areas. These AVM models won't know of these streets. They might also not figure out that a specific school serves one street, but not the next street. These school boundaries can change with time, and some people want to be in a specific school, not just a specific school district.

There are other factors that these AVM models can't take into account, such as whether a swimming pool is a negative or a positive in our area (the answer: it depends), walk-ability vs drive-ability, commute times, transit, local labor costs, etc.

Objective Viewpoint

Part of having a real estate professional help sell your home is that a professional can take an objective view of your house. Since you've lived there many years, you'll most likely have figured out work-arounds to some of the issues with your home, or have some deferred maintenance, or some deferred upgrades.

Market Expertise

Knowing the local market is a huge advantage. There are times when the market changes faster than statistics can catch up. This is a prime example of where having a knowledgeable professional can be very beneficial.

Negotiation Skills

We've helped many people buy and sell homes. Every one of these transactions has been different. Each one required different vantage points and skills to get them done. Some of these ended up in multiple offers, while others were just a single offer. No matter what the case, our goal is for a win-win situation, where the buyer is happy with the purchase, and the seller is happy with the sale.

Knowledge of the Sales Process

This is one of the key reasons to use a real estate professional. Each transaction has had differences in the timelines but they all basically have the same sales process. Having sold many homes this past year alone, we know the sales process back and forth. 

Time

One of the main reasons that it is better to hire a real estate professional to sell your home is the time it takes. The time involved differs for each home but some of the items include: time to market the home, time to generate showings, time to reverse prospect, time to qualify potential buyers, time to dig through the bogus leads from various social media sites, etc.

Higher Net Sales Price

There are a couple of recent studies that show selling a house with a real estate professional (vs FSBO) yields a higher net sales price. 

Why did my FSBO sell for less than market value?

There are a few reasons that FSBO homes sell for lower values. The main reasons are: less market exposure yields less demand which in turn yields a lower price; people looking for an FSBO house tend to want a good deal so they tend to offer lower and still subtract out what they think is a listing commission; and real estate professionals know the hassle of working with an inexperienced home seller and tell their buyers that issues could arise since they don't know what they are doing. 

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We would love to help you get the most out of your property.

Should you be thinking of selling, or would simply like an update of where your property sits in today's market, book a non-obligatory discussion with one of our TemasekClass consultants.