Sure a real estate agent can help with this. And with pricing, staging, marketing, negotiating, contracts, escrows… a good agent has a network of mortgage people, lawyers, inspectors, contractors, etc that can be called on if an unexpected problem shows up… they have the experience to know how to deal with problems that come up…</p>
<p>I think a good real estate agent brings value to the transaction.</p>
<p>Of course, I am biased, being married to one. :D</p>
<p>Plus. since a buyer knows that there is no commission they will adjust their offers down to account for that right from the start. Since the buyer is the one paying the money, they feel that they are entitled to the savings, not the seller. So it’s not clear how much if any extra money the seller makes doing a FSBO.</p>
<p>Time is another big factor… the seller has to be available for showings, sometimes with very little or no notice. If you work, this can be a problem and makes it harder to sell your house.</p>
<p>This is not to say a person can’t successfully do a FSBO, but I remember seeing statistics somewhere that the vast majority of FSBOs wind up being listed with an agent. Something like over 80%.</p>
<p>Of course, you are right. It is a BIG PIA to sell yourself. We lived in this area before and a real estate agent was very helpful to me on my first FSBO. We sold the first house in 1992, and moved to a different state, but I remember her name and she is still working. We will interview her. </p>
<p>I do think that a real estate agent can be a great sales asset. Where if you are selling and showing it yourself, telling how wonderful it is can come off differently. I imagine what we will do is put the word out but eventually list.
We also ave a geriatric dog that will need to be OUT of the house for each showing, which will complicate everything.</p>
<p>A friend of mine just sold her dad’s house without it ever going on the market. Her lawyer’s daughter bought it. Perhaps a conflict of interest, but she got close to the price she asked.</p>
<p>As NRE stated, there are lots of benefit of using a Realtor.</p>
<p>In a hot market, FSBO is very possible. People will knock on the door to see whether the home is for sale and if you are renovating, there will be lots of inquires.</p>
<p>However, the one of the most important factor using a Realtor is liability. Realtor carries E&O insurance and FSBO does not have. It does not happen often, but if some thing went wrong with the transaction and you get legal action, the cost of defense could be very costly, some thing in the tune of 100K or more. The reason for legal action could be disclosure, property lines or even what you have done a neighbor did not like.</p>
<p>There is not conflict of interest. Either one of them could inherited the home and in CA, the property tax will not be reassessed for the grand daughter to “buy” the home. For all intensive purposes, she could bought it for $1 and who is to sue?</p>
<p>FSBO is to sell the house to an un-related party in an arms length negotiation.</p>
No - a realtor doesn’t pre-qualify a buyer - a ‘lender’ pre-qualifies a buyer. </p>
<p>A realtor is really pretty much a salesperson. Depending on the marketplace having that salesperson might be important or at least convenient but might also be not worth the expense or not needed at all. People seem to be conditioned to think they need a realtor to sell or buy a house but they don’t. It’s the escrow company that handles the details anyway - not the realtor. Depending on the realtor and depending on the buyer/seller the realtor may bring valuable experience (but 6% worth?) but often times doesn’t if the realtor isn’t really that experienced, if the buyer/seller IS experienced, or if it’s a fairly slam/dunk transaction (ex: buyer putting 25% or more cash down).</p>
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that a competent agent will make sure that a buyer has been prequalified before even presenting the offer, so as not to waste everyone’s time.</p>
<p>In my state there are no escrow companies. The seller’s agent’s brokerage typically handles the money. Closings by law can only be done by a lawyer. A FSBO seller can have their lawyer escrow the money, but a lot of lawyers don’t want to deal with this.</p>
<p>I think most commissions around here are now 4%, some are 5%. 6% is very very rare.</p>
<p>The real estate agent not only brings experience, they bring customers. It is hard to get your property widely noticed these days if you can’t get in MLS or one of the other big databases. In my area there are low cost very low service agencies that can get you in MLS, and if the FSBO seller offers a 2% commission to the buyer’s agent, they can get some traffic.</p>
<p>Where we live, commission is usually 6% split between the buyer’s agent and seller’s agent. That’s not set in stone as circumstances can affect that number.</p>
<p>In my state 6% is split between the agents and between the buyers too. Generally B&S each pay 3% but in unusual market conditions that may vary.</p>
I think that’s stated well. Of course not all agents are competent and there’s no reason an agent is needed for that. In my case I just asked the buyer how much they were planning to put down and when the answer was 30% I knew there was little chance of not being able to get a loan. It was a slam-dunk. If the buyer had indicated 10% I probably wouldn’t have entered a contract unless they had a written pre-qual letter from a lender guaranteeing they really are pre-qualified. </p>
<p>
I sold my FSBO (in a short amount of time) from an ad I put in the paper. I bought a FSBO after seeing the sign in the ground at the house (IIRC) while I was out driving around looking at residential areas.</p>
<p>I think the internet’s changing everything in this area and will make the MLS less relevant, which is good to reduce that monopoly, and it makes the realtor less relevant because in the comfort of my chair at home with my browser I can what’s for sale, I can view pictures of the place, and I can even street view and bird’s-eye view the place and the area. Before the advent of the internet it was much more difficult and the MLS and driving to each prospect was necessary. The realtor has less work to do now in many cases.</p>
<p>
Unless the buyer uses the listing brokerage in which case that brokerage (not really the agent) gets the whole 6% and this is more likely to happen IMO given what I just described above about the internet searches.</p>
<p>^^ It was quite a while ago. In this day and age I’d use different means and the internet is a great equalizing information source. </p>
<p>Note that if my house didn’t sell in a reasonable period of time I probably would have decided I needed a professional salesperson (aka realtor) to market it. Luckily I didn’t need that. </p>
<p>Not all situations are a good fit for a FSBO but I’m saying a realtor isn’t necessary for all situations either. More people ought to give the FSBO method a try. Nothing ventured nothing gained. Note that I’m a DIYer by nature so maybe I’m more willing to do things like this myself. It’s really not that difficult.</p>
<p>We’ve done it both ways, using a realtor only once, and it bears repeating that it really is market dependent. In our neighborhood, I’ve never seen a FSBO sell unless it was a tear down going for lot value to a builder. In another market, it could be the best choice ever. But in any case, it’s not usually possible to know for sure if it could have gone better had you done x instead of y. We can say, “well, we sold fast!” But you don’t know for sure if using a realtor might have drummed up more traffic and thus more competition and possibly multiple offers. Or perhaps the FSBO got the same price as a listed property would have, but sans commission. There’s no way to know for sure whether or not you left money on the table. </p>
<p>I think sometimes people overestimate their abilities - “I can do it just as well as a realtor” when the fact is they just don’t know what they don’t know. My DH insists that he can list a property himself and save us money. It has usually gone his way. But this last time, in a very high end market where FSBOs just don’t get it done, we did it his way and got one offer well below asking. We listed it with a “heavy hitter”, and within one hour of going on MLS, we had 3 showings. The realtor also had us list our price at almost 100K over the price DH had set when he was going to go it alone. DH based our asking price based on comps, which any intelligent seller can investigate. But what he didn’t have was years of experience working our area and seeing what kinds of things appeal to buyers which cannot be quantified by per square foot comps. She knew that our property had some qualities which was going to generate an emotional sale, so we listed it at her price against our better judgment. We were WRONG. We got our price and DH had to admit that THIS TIME, the realtor paid off. She got much more traffic in than he had been able to get in the 3 month trial we did when he listed it (he is not in MLS and we had to use the usual methods of internet traffic that FSBOs use). The realtor paid for professional photos (a MUST in our neighborhood as everyone has beautiful professional photos which blow away the average amateur). You have to look at what your local competition is doing as other markets just don’t have the same relevance. She advertised better than DH could on his own (very visible newspaper advertising, internet showcasing, specialty magazines marketed towards this kind of buyer, held high producer broker only open houses, etc.) </p>
<p>At the end of the day, DH had to admit that listing it with a residential realtor who has spent years working our specific neighborhood got it done where he did not. Next time, he will definitely want to go it alone again because he’s really actually very good. So we’ll see what happens.</p>
My motivation to do the FSBO in the first place was after getting an estimate for the sale price from an experienced realtor. I felt she under-estimated it and told her to forget it as far as representing me. I then did my own comps of homes in the neighborhood and came up with a price I thought it would be able to reasonably sell for yet not be too low. I’m confident I got a good and reasonable price for that home yet it was much more than the realtor estimated it at and I saved the commission to boot.</p>
<p>Ditto with the house I bought as a FSBO. By the time I bought it I had looked at dozens of homes. I had a pretty good idea of the value of that home. I think the purchase price was reasonable for both me and the buyer and we both benefited from the commission savings.</p>
<p>I research things to death and am willing to spend the time and effort to understand the issue I’m dealing with - in this case home prices for the specific attributes I was looking for.</p>
<p>
In the cases above ‘I knew what I knew’ and I not only did it just as well as a realtor - I did it better.</p>
<p>One other thing to watch out for when selling a house via a realtor - they sometimes want to price the home to sell fast since it means less work on their part, it gets the money in their pocket quicker, and sometimes the homeowner might even be happier even if blissfully ignorant. The difference in what the realtor makes whether the home is, for example, $10K-25K lower, is really quite low (I’m talking about the actual realtor) and if it means they can turn the transaction more quickly they actually, in some cases, have incentive to sell it at a lower price. I’m not saying all do this but really - think about it. It definitely happens. Don’t put that much faith in a realtor - do your own homework and make sure it makes sense.</p>
<p>
I agree with that and I’ll add ‘situation dependent’. For example, if you’re trying to sell a home you’re not living in and the home is across town or in a different state, and you’re working it might be too logistically difficult to sell it yourself. Another example is if it ‘needs’ to be turned more quickly. There are other situations where it makes sense.</p>
<p>^^^We did toy with listing our house several years earlier with a very high profile realtor who made a huge deal about how fast she sold houses. Well, she gave us a price on our home, and we realized why she sells so fast. She listed them way too low, so of course they were snapped up! In our case, the agent listed it WAY higher than we would have imagined, and I really thought we were going to have to eat crow. </p>
<p>I have been watching home prices in our neighborhood since we sold, and no one is getting near what we got for our house. In this instance, the realtor did a better job for us. Like I said, it was kind of a unique situation, and DH usually gets it done on his own better than listing because he really is quite good at real estate. I don’t think he’ll agree to list it again, even given our last experience, because other than that, he has done a great job for us.</p>
<p>You guys do not bother me. I am enjoying reading the FSBO posts because we may try it again. The idea about down payment amount is a great way to figure out which way the buyer is coming in. I guess it is slightly off the original post, but I never follow a straight train of thought anyway. </p>
<p>We have lots of empty nesters in this neighborhood. Two houses have sold to parents for their divorced daughters. </p>
and I not only did it just as well as a realtor - I did it better.</p>