Selling Your Own Home In A Tough Real Estate Market - Five Tips
By Jeff McRitchie
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 the
house 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
and don'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 cut
the 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 houses that 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 designer and Director
of Marketing for http://www.MyBinding.com. He writes extensively
on topics related to Binding Machines,Binding Supplies,Report
Covers,Binders, Index Tabs, Laminators, Laminating Pouches, Roll
Film, Shredders, and Paper Handling Equipment.
Source: http://www.isnare.com
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