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Selling Your Own Home In A Tough Real Estate Market
- Five Tips
If you are in a tough real estate market and are looking to
sell your home quickly, you might want to consider
doing a For Sale By Owner. My wife and I recently bought a new
house and after trying unsuccessfully to
sell our existing house through a real estate agent for several
months decided to try For Sale by Owner.
We found a buyer within four days and closed on the house three
weeks later. However, through our
experience we discovered a few things. Here are a few tips if
you are considering a FSBO in a less than
ideal real estate market.
1. Consider paying to have your home placed in the MLS. There
are several companies out there that will do
this for a few hundred dollars. With sales down, real estate
agents are desperate to earn a commission.
By putting the house in the MLS you are agreeing that if an
agent brings a buyer to you that you will pay the
agent their part of the commission (you still save the listing
agents commission). If you can sell the house on
your own with no agent then you won't have to pay an agent.
However, in a tough market you want as
many possible eyes on your property as possible.
2. Get the word out to as many places as possible about your
house. One of the best places to do this is on the
internet. There are dozens of free websites that will allow
you to post your house for free. Consider starting with
craigslist since it has so much traffic and then spread out
to the other sites on the net. It will probably take you
an entire evening to get thehouse posted on all the sites and
you will want to keep a spreadsheet with your
usernames and passwords so that you can go back later and remove
the listing once the house sells.
3. Design a professional looking flyer and put out for sale
by owner signs and a flyer box. If you aren't the artistic
type anddon't know that much about designing things like flyers
consider a site like vflyer which will give you
templates for designing a flyer. Take some good pictures of
the house with your digital camera and put them
on the flyer. If you use Vflyer or a program like it you can
probably use the same template to post the house to
craigslist and ebay (if you decide to pay for a listing).
4. Be creative. When we put our house on the market we ordered
an eight foot full color printed banner to put
on our fence. Our house backed to a major street and we were
able to get some major exposure from the banner.
I have heard of people offering free vacations, big screen tvs,
cash bonus' to the listing agent and even a free car.
I have also heard of people giving away a cool prize at their
open house. These things can help get your house
noticed which is the first step to getting it sold.
5. Make sure that your price is competitive. Consider using
the money that you are saving on real estate
commissions to cutthe price of your house so that it is more
competitive. In tough markets it is going to be very
important that your house isn't priced too high or people will
find another option. In our area there were a ton of
houses on the market and most of the housesthat were selling
were 5% or more undervalued. If that is what it
takes you might need to swallow hard and cut the price of your
house.
Of course all of these things are just suggestions. Still,
when things get tough and you need to sell your house
these could be an option for you. They worked for us.
About the Author: Jeff McRitchie is the director of marketing
for www.MyBinding.com and lives in Hillsboro,
Oregon. He writesextensively on topics related to Binding Machines,
Binding Supplies, Report Covers,
Binders, Index Tabs, Laminators, Laminating Pouches, Roll Film,
Shredders, and Paper Handling Equipment.
