How an agent can help: Your agent will handle all the scheduling and staff the tours for you, so all you have to do is quickly tidy up and vacate. Unfortunately, typically these offers are very low and could likely lead to no sale. “Sellers who advertise their FSBO will quickly be inundated with calls from real estate investors who are looking to save the same commission the seller hopes to save,” Sterling says. And on top of scheduling actual potential buyers, you also have to deal with both looky-loos (gawkers with no intention of buying the house) and “sharks,” (investors looking to flip your house for a profit). Showings are a dragįSBO sellers don’t realize how draining it can be to set up showings.
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“We know how to spend the least amount of money to get the best outcome and home presentation possible,” Hooper says.
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How an agent can help: Even if you’re not up for a full home makeover, your agent has an eye for detail and can recommend simple, budget-conscious swaps that can translate into real dollars when it comes negotiation time. Instead, she advised a $10,000 investment for paint, staging, and minor repairs, which still netted $45,000 above their target price. Hooper had sellers who were convinced they had to totally overhaul their 35-year-old kitchen and floors to the tune of about $50,000.
On the flip side, if you’re trying to make the home sale by owner option work, you might end up investing far more money than is needed. That means you might be turning off potential buyers with an amateur paint job, an overgrown yard, or even a broken doorbell. “A novice home seller is unlikely to view their home objectively or know how to stage it to appeal to the broadest audience,” says Hooper. You could underestimate (or overestimate) how much money to spend on curb appeal The goal is to make sure you’re pricing your home in the sweet spot-not too high so that you are turning off potential buyers, and not too low so you are leaving money on the table. How an agent can help: A real estate agent will provide an accurate home value based on a comprehensive market analysis to help you arrive at the right listing price.
“The home becomes stigmatized, and buyers are likely to pay a lower price when the home has been on the market an extended period of time,” Ferguson says.
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The danger in overpricing a home is that it will languish on the market, and buyers will wonder why, even if you lower the price later, says Mark Ferguson, a real estate agent with Pro Realty in Greeley, CO. “There’s no substitute for actual market knowledge.” “Using a free online valuation tool is like bringing your doctor a printout of your Google search about symptoms and possible cures,” says Jon Sterling, a real estate consultant with Keller Williams Realty in San Francisco. Those who put their homes on the market as FSBO tend to set a price based on an online assessment tool or the lofty sum that the neighbor down the street claims they were offered-two methods that are liable to put the listing price way off.
2. Homes for sale by owner could be priced wrong FSBO sellers would have to shell out big bucks for advertising and still might not reach the most important audience. Your real estate agent will also have the means to promote your house to fellow agents to share with their clients. How an agent can help: Using an agent automatically offers widespread exposure for your listing through the multiple listing service. Sticking a sign in your yard or trying to pull off some DIY social media marketing hardly has the same effect. Buyers always start online, and “for sale by owner” sellers are unlikely to get the exposure they need on a number of listings websites to reach their audience, says Realtor® Wendy Hooper with Coast Realty Services in Newport Beach, CA.