For sale by owner vs. Realtor

The disadvantages of selling your home yourself

You’ll have to figure out how to market your home. This is one of the bigger disadvantages of selling your home by yourself. You see, if you are allowed to use the MLS to list your home, your property will be exposed to hundreds of ready and willing buyers ready to buy a home and hundreds of Realtors ready to sell your home. As the saying goes, if you have the traffic, you can sell your product or service. This goes with a home too and in my opinion, this is one of the best reasons to let a professional sale your home. (p.s. there are companies that will sell your home with a “flat fee” and allow you to list your home into the MLS)

You will have to spend the time to show your home and complete “open houses” on the weekends. Some people are comfortable showing their own home. They don’t mind spending their weekends and every part of the day trying to sell their home. You’ll need to understand that buyers will talk bad about your home. Sometimes, this is just to try and get a better deal on your home, but sometimes, it’s just the buyers thinking out loud. And many times, Realtors will pre-qualify their buyers so the buyers that are going through your home will be ready to buy. So if you are not pre-qualifying buyers, there could be a lot of “tire kickers.”

You’ll have to learn how to fill out the contracts and submit the paperwork. Each contract is different for each state. There are new regulations regarding your real estate contract. I personally feel more comfortable having the realtor take care of this and all of the legal stuff regarding the sales contract. I read these all of the time. Most of them are pretty standard. I’ve also seen some that are basically on one page and penciled in. There’s lots of legal responsibilities and disclosers when selling your home. For this reason, if the realtor didn’t have the contract, I’d be sure to let the lawyer handle the legal stuff, but that’s just me. Some people will feel perfectly comfortable feeling out a one page form.

You’ll have to negotiate the contract and sale of your home. If you are good at negotiating, this may be easy for you. This may be an advantage. But in most cases, realtors are trained to negotiate. Some will negotiate for you, but others may not. Be sure to learn some negotiating skills, because you’ll need them to get the best price for your home.

You may not understand what the value of your home is? This is a big one. If you don’t understand home values, you will price your home too high or too low. If you price your home too high, you won’t sell your home. If you get a buyer, most likely the deal will fall through during the appraisal. If you price your home too low, you’ll give away money that you could have got otherwise. But this is a game that is difficult to play, because the market changes with time and the interest rate, the seasons, etc.

To find the value of your home, you’ll have to hire a real estate appraiser or find out what your home value is. This may seem like a waist of money, but that is what the banks do when they become the proud owner of a foreclosure. They will have an appraisal completed to list the home. Next, they will have an appraisal completed if they get an offer and they will negotiate based on what the appraiser has disclosed in the appraisal. Many times, you may be able to get away with a desktop appraisal, just to make sure that the values have not changed significantly.

So, if you’re thinking about selling your own home consider these disadvantages to decide if saving the commission check is really worth it. Some people think it is and others think it’s no big deal. I’ve ran into several cases where the home owners got it all wrong and lost a lot of money because of knowing just enough to be dangerous. I’ve also met several people, one of which was my neighbor who got to keep all of the money from the sale of their home.