Drawbacks of Selling Your Home on Your Own

As you will see, most people who try selling their home on their own fail because they lack the necessary expertise and knowledge of a real estate agent. Whether you should try selling your home on your own or not depends on a couple of things. Do you have the expertise? Can you drive the buyers? Do you know how to price your home correctly? Do you have expert knowledge of the paperwork? Sadly, most FSBOs do not. Every year, the National Association of Realtors puts out what they call their “Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers,” where they survey lots of different buyers and sellers at closing and ask them questions about their transactions. Here’s what they found: FOSBO transactions only made up 9% of all residential transactions 45% of those people already knew the buyer before they put their house up for sale. 89% of buyers said that they found their house through a real estate agent. 86% of those people said that the agent was the one who brought the home to their attention. FSBOs on average sell for 17% less than those who list their homes with real estate agents. There are a couple of reasons we can identify why this happens. For one thing, FSBOs tend to attract a lower quality of buyer. Another reason is they lack the knowledge and expertise of what’s going on in the market. They don’t have the network needed to find buyers, the marketing to expose their home to the market, and lack the knowledge of paperwork needed or how to even use that paperwork. Lastly, they lack the knowledge of how to price their property in the market. FSBOs on average sell for 17% less than those who listed with an agent. Lots of times we see FSBOs drastically overprice their property. Overpricing your property ends up helping you shoot yourself in the foot. You end up selling for much less than what the house could have sold for in the beginning. If you’re thinking about going the route of FSBO, you certainly can. There are success stories every day; however, the majority of FSBOs fail miserably. A real estate agent can help you with that. They’re there so that you can get the most amount of money for your property in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of hassles. Even after you’ve paid them their commission, they’ll net you more money than if you tried selling your home on your own. If you’re thinking about selling your home, talk to us first. Just give us a call or send us an email and we’d be happy to help you.

You can listen to Drawbacks of Selling Your Home on Your Own online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Drawbacks of Selling Your Home on Your Own is an episode from Dallas Area Housing Trends by Scott Neal.

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This episode was published on Sep 23, 2016.

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