Published October 14, 2021

Why It May Not Be Worth It To Do FSBO.

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Mr./Mrs. for sale by owner (FSBO), hire a professional. Selling and purchasing a home is one of your biggest financial decisions you’ll ever make. Would you go to court without representation? No, of course not, there’s licensed and trained professionals that will fight on your behalf for you. So why would you sell your from FSBO? Maybe it will save you from paying commission. Maybe you like doing things on your own and your own way, but selling a home shouldn’t be one of those things you do on your own. Instead, clean up and fix up your home and call a real estate agent to get you the most you possibly can for your home.

Contracts

So, what are some actual reasons not to do FSBO? Here I’ll give you three! First, and probably the most important, paperwork and contracts. Do you know how to read a contract to find out what the buyer is willing to pay, inspections, closing date, etc.? Maybe, but probably not. Also, what about filling out contracts, seller disclosures, OGM disclosures, lead based paint disclosure, etc.? Contracts can get tricky, having a real estate agent takes the stress of reviewing contracts out of your hands and walks you through anything you have to fill out. There’s no second guessing when you hire a real estate agent.

Commission

Saving yourself from paying a commission. You might be saving yourself a commission but you’ll probably get less for your home. “Homes that are for sale by an unrepresented seller, on average, sell for 33% less and spend more time on the market than homes that are sold by a REALTOR®.” (National Association of REALTORS®) So let's think here, you list your home for $175,000. Depending on commission charged it would be around $10,500 but you decided to do FSBO and not have to spend any money. Your home is on the market for 6 months and somebody finally puts in an offer. They offer less than what you're asking, but you accept because you're not getting much action. Cool, you accepted an offer and now time to do all the legal things that you aren’t experienced in doing and close the deal. Even though this whole time, your home was probably worth $215,000 and had you worked with a real estate agent, you would have gotten more money even after paying commission. Let’s not forget you would’ve had way less stress during the deal.

Pricing

This one will be short since we touched on this in the last paragraph. Pricing. How did you figure out the price of your home? You don’t have access to the MLS where you can do a market analysis. Did you just look at what houses are going for now and price it off that? Real estate professionals can give you a pretty accurate price for your home. Even if you’re planning to go with an agent, try to figure out the price of your home by yourself and see how different it is from your real estate agent’s. I know this is pretty straightforward, but I’m not going to sugar coat this. This is not just easy work anyone can do, hire an agent.

To end, there were three reasons to not do FSBO. There’s many more reasons why to hire a real estate agent that I’ll touch base on later. For now, you should really understand that it isn’t easy to sell a home FSBO (real estate agents just have really good poker faces.) We are here to help you get the most money for your home! We always want what’s best for you, not us.