Sold The House By Owner, from the workbench

Well, I guess we have not in fact sold our house by owner yet. That’ll happen at closing in mid December (fingers crossed). But here is how we got an offer.

We are hardly real estate experts, so this post is simply a roundup of things that happened to work for us. Here is hoping they assist anyone else attempting to Hands-on their house sale too. The cool thing is that the people buying our house are not journal readers (they’d never heard about us or YHL- but we disclosed the journal to them to ensure that they were cool with images of the house with our furniture remaining on the site). Anyway, we thought it would encourage other FSBO peeps to know that you do not need a journal to sell your house. But it was interesting for us to learn that our journal had nothing to do with attracting the people who are buying our house. Anyway, here are our pointers:

Pointer #1: Pick the right asking price. This is paramount. And we did not do this at first. We priced the house too high and we only had two showings in the first two weeks. Then we at last got real with ourselves, dropped things by about 25K, and priced our house to sell in this less-than-ideal market based on what similar homes in our area were going for. Would not you know we had fourteen showings within two weeks of the price drop – and an offer within two days of it. Truly cannot stress this step sufficient.

Pointer #2: Clean and declutter your house within an inch of its life. Now is not the time to leave a pile of socks in the laundry room or a stack of bills in the kitchen. And dust bunnies have no place in your house when it is on the market. Oh and make sure the house does not smell funny while you are at it. Sure you’d hope prospective buyers can look beyond any lapses in cleanliness, but those dirty spots can signal to the buyer that the house is not cared for in other areas either. Here are a few posts about what else we did to get things ready for sale-age (here, here, here, and here).

Pointer #3: Market the heck out of it. The remarkable thing about using a realtor (which we certainly would have done if we could not get this done on our own after a months or two of trying) is the fact that they can draw a ton of potential buyers to your house thanks to clients, connections, and widespread publicity on sites like MLS. To offset this advantage you will have to do a heckova lot of legwork yourself. The FSBO route is not straightforward by any means. We paid to put ads in the paper, re-listed our house on craigslist every few days, picked up a for-sale sign and made countless fliers for the front yard, and eventually spent $295 to put it on MLS ourselves (using this service – although in the time since we used it we have heard this complaint, so perhaps it is not as pleasant as it used to be). All told we spent about $500 marketing our house- but it certainly beats the $12k that we would have spent on a typical 6% realtor fee.

Pointer #4: Learn how to show the home in a way that appeals to buyers. We learned that keeping Clara, Burger, and myself out of the house (we went on pleasant long walks) while potential buyers were led on a swift tour by John was the most professional and crowd-pleasing way to conduct showings. After John’s speedy walk-through he would step outside and let people poke around on their own simply to see how they liked the feel of the house without anyone hovering. And if it was raining sometimes Burgs, the bean, and I would hang out in the car since walks were out of the question.

Pointer #5: Make a strong argument for why your house is worth buying. Your flier (and the things you mention when you show the home) truly can make all the difference. We learned that pointing out that many items would convey with the sale truly helped people see brought in value (we tossed in all of our appliances, window treatments, light fixtures, dining room shelving, and even the master bedroom built-ins & our bed frame). We also pointed out things like the size of our large .75 acre lot and our two-car garage, which are both rarities that most other homes on the market in our price point do not offer. And of course mentioning perks like the newly remodeled kitchen and baths, the new roof, the refinished hardwood floors, the new windows, and the other upgrades that we put into our home seemed to truly set us apart from some of the other un-updated brick ranches on the market.

Pointer #6: Figure out what to do if you get an offer. The whole purpose of selling your house is to get an offer, but if you do not know what to do when you get there, you are kind of sinking your own battleship. You will certainly want to bone up on your negotiation skills and learn how to trust smart people. Sure we were selling our home by owner, but we did not do it on our own. Not even close. We even asked the buyers agent that we used to purchase our new house a few questions along the way- and we certainly relied heavily on assist from the closing attorney and lending agent that we hired for the transaction (they were both people that we have used before, so we truly appreciated their opinions). When it came to ratifying the contract and getting through all the finer points like inspection negotiations and closing date determinations they truly were our sounding board. Hiring a closing attorney is only a few hundred bucks, and you in fact have to pay for a closing attorney whether you FSBO or do things through a realtor, so it was a no-brainer to rely on ours for all the assist we could get.

Oh and thanks to the fact that most buyers will present you with an offer on paper, you simply have to tweak that and “respond” to it (instead of drafting anything up from scratch). But you will certainly want to have the legally necessary papers on hand (like a lead paint disclosure form and a residential property disclosure form- both things that we googled and found online). Your closing attorney should be able to assist you with those if you cannot track them down. I guess the key here is that a good closing attorney can truly be an remarkable resource- especially so you are sure that everything you are doing is 100% legit. Gotta protect yourself!

Pointer #7: Rest assured that realtors will not boycott an FSBO house. At least that was not our experience. AT ALL. Nearly all of the showings that we attracted were to people with a buyers agent at their side (the agents were in fact the ones calling us to schedule each showing). In fact, the people buying our house came through a realtor (so of course we owe a small percentage to that realtor since she’s acting as their agent) but we certainly appreciated not having to shell out close to 7K to a sellers agent as well (since we took on the marketing and the showings ourselves and did all the paperwork directly with a closing attorney as opposed to using a sellers agent for those items).

So that is what we did to get ‘er done. Again – we certainly would have used a realtor if we did not have much luck in the first few months, but we are simply such DIYers that it felt fitting to give the whole for-sale-by-owner thing a shot and share our experiences with you folks. Is there anyone else out there who sold their house by owner? Feel free to chime in with more pointers and tricks. We are certain there are at least a few things we forgot to mention and likely a ton of things that we did not even think of. It is remarkable what a learning curve the whole experience can be. Now we will simply be holding our breath for a swift and painless closing in around a month’s time. Is it December yet?