How To Sell Your House Yourself, Is It Something You Can Do….
How To Sell Your House Yourself is not that hard, its just a matter of how much your time is worth to you and how much you like to learn about new things. I’m a master number 11 so learning is in my natural makeup and it never is work to me when I’m learning new things. But I would say for most people this is not the case and so hopefully you will learn something from my many times of actually selling my own homes myself.
How To Sell Your House Yourself
How To Sell Your House Yourself and what I learned from doing it….
Well first of all its not as easy as some people would have you believe. But I would also say the average person could do it. I believe anyone can do anything though and have never shied away from learning anything that interested me. With that said, I’ll explain as much of the process as I can without getting to technical.
I have been buying and selling Real Estate since I was 15 years old, so I think I’m pretty qualified to give advice in this area. So first things first.
The following are things I had to do and learn about when I sold all my homes. So they are not just questions but things that you have to be prepared to address when tackling the job of, “How To Sell Your House Yourself”.
- Do you have the time to deal with selling your own home?
- Do you have the ability to write ad copy, because selling a home is all about advertising
- Do you have access to a computer?
- Do you have a fax machine, email and phone to handle inquirers?
- Are you comfortable showing your home to complete strangers?
- Do you know how to prepare a home to be shown, what to do and what not to do.
- Are you easily bored with doing the same task over and over? Like posting ads on the internet
- Do you have a good professional looking sign and flyer holder for the front yard?
- Do you have the necessary forms to write up an offer?
- Are you comfortable with the idea that you could have to defend yourself in court as a result of the transaction? (this actually did happen to me, more on this later)
- If so can you handle the court issues or will you have to pay an attorney to get you out of the potential mess?
- Are you a good negotiator?
- Are you able to detach yourself personally from the home and negotiate effectively to get it sold and put the deal together?
- Are you knowledgeable about loan programs offered for prospective buyers of your home? Special financing that may be available like USDA Loans in some areas.
- Do you have adequate insurance in place to cover potential accidents when showing your home?
- Are you prepared to handle the calls that will potentially come in at all hours of the day and nite about your home.
- Are you ready to handle repetitive questions about the home from numerous potential buyers?
- Do you know how to screen out low probability buyers?
- Do you know how to gather the feedback and adjust your price accordingly?
- Do you know how to weed out potential would be thieves that target FSBO’s?
- Do you have access to getting the home into the MLS?
- Can you take great photographs that showcase your home in the best manner possible?
- Are you at ease with telling all your neighbors that your homes is for sale and asking if they know anyone interested in moving into the area?
- Do you have any expertise in internet marketing? This has become even more important.
- How much are you willing to spend on selling your home yourself?
- At what point will you decide to hire a Real Estate Professional to sell the home? (Your exit strategy in essence of when to call it quits)
- Have you figured out all your title issues and any liens on the property.
- Do you have an escrow agent you can work with?
- Is there anyone that can help you through the process or will you have to pay for services? (this can add up)
- Do you have a budget for your marketing expenses?
- Will you be offering a selling office commission and if so how much?(this is a must)
How To Sell Your House Yourself…Sounds like I’m trying to scare you……..
But I’m not, this is just the reality of trying to sell your house yourself. I’m writing this How To Sell Your House Yourself article to make sure you understand whats really involved here. To many people think its easy and then attempt it, spend a thousand dollars or so giving it a shot and then end up hiring a real estate professional to get it sold.
How To Sell Your House Yourself
Now when I was doing it, print advertising was the main medium of getting a house exposed to the public, but today its all about the internet, so in some ways it is easier but in reality it is even harder to compete or to show up in the search engines.
How To Sell Your House Yourself used to be a pretty level playing field. what I mean is anyone could buy a 3 line ad in the sunday newspaper and they would have the same chance to be seen as anyone else.
How To Sell Your House Yourself
Well with the internet that is not even close to being the case. You will be lucky to get noticed on the internet unless you know what your doing. even most agents today can’t effectively compete with people like myself who have so much more expertise than they do.
See look above and you’ll see what I mean, If your not on the first page, you can forget about getting seen. And the first page only has 10 spots to possibly show up on.
You best bet is the MLS system and any other website you can pay to post your home listing on, but this can add up since you have to pay by the month or for a set time frame and then you have to renew it, which can get expensive fast.
So that is why I asked about your advertising budget? Its very important you have all this figured out before you attempt to sell your own home.
How To Sell Your House Yourself
One more thing to be aware of is the possibility of getting sued after the fact, no matter how remote you believe this possibility is, it can happen and it did to me on one of the homes I sold myself.
I had done an extensive remodel on this particular home and after I sold it a year later the owner sued us, claiming we had covered up cracks in the foundation that were now leaking into the home and ruining the basement carpet and flooring.
Well I tried to help the guy out and made offers to help make the repairs but in the end he was just to unreasonable and I had to defend a lawsuit for two years. I actually represented myself through out the entire process and through tow different law firms.
In the end he gave up and dropped it and we did not loose anything but a lot of time and a few hundred dollars. But it could have been worse.
So this can happen in fact they say the average person will get sued 1 or 2 times in their lifetime and if you sell real estate you just increased your odds of getting sued.
So I hope this How To Sell Your House Yourself post helped in some way.
And if you decide to hire a Real Estate Professional I hope you take the time to read about our SEO Listing Expertise on this website and decide to give us a call. At the very least we can help you make a better decision on whether to go it alone or not.
We offer an extremely attractive listing commission plan and in the end most people agree that it is more than fair and hire us to sell their homes for them.
Call us at:
253-227-6101 Paul Galaviz
or
253-279-2588 Tanya Galaviz
email us at:
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