Why Sell Your Property By Owner?

IT'S NOT DIFFICULT

I can't say this enough....Buying and Selling your home privately is Easy!!

If you can sell your own car, you can sell your own home.  All you have to do is find a buyer, get a lawyer and the rest is history.

And you can use as your best advertising resource.

LIMITS YOUR FRUSTRATION AND HASSEL

When an agent wants to show your home, you are normally required to leave.  As a person who has sold many homes privately, that seems a little bizarre.   You want, and need, to speak up for your home, and they are asking you to leave while they show your home.

And every morning that you leave for work, you have to make sure things are spotless in the event that the house is shown by an agent.

Personal Experience:
My sister and brother-in-law decided to sell their home by real-estate because they thought by selling it that way they would sell it quicker (that's another story).  Anyhow, the real-estate agent had not brought someone around for about 2 weeks.  My sister called her agent inquiring about why no one had looked at it in 2 weeks.  Well, later that afternoon, miraculously, someone wanted to look at it.  Coincidence?

YOU KNOW YOUR HOME BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE

Let me ask you a question.  Who do you think knows your home the best?  A real-estate agent who has looked through it once?  Or you, who have lived in it day in day out?  That seems like a pretty easy question to answer huh?

In selling our homes privately, my wife did an incredible job of selling our homes, because she is the one that lived in it every day.   She understood the features and benefits of various features of the house.   She had lived it and had a lot more compassion than a real-estate agent would have.

YOU'RE IN CONTROL NOT THE REALESTATE AGENT

When you deal with a real-estate agent, they make you sign a contract where you are obligated to them..  If you find someone at work that would like to buy your home and you want them to show the house, you have to go through the real-estate agent.  If they happen to buy, the real-estate agent gets his/her commission even though he/she did not find the buyer.

Personal Experience:
The home that my sister sold through real-estate was sold in a similar manner. Because their home was for sale for over 3 months, they decided to take a more active role in finding someone to buy there home because they were moving to another city.  As it turned out, some friends of theirs knew some friends that were looking for a house similar to theirs.  They brought them over and showed them the house (without the real-estate agent).  And guess what???  They bought the house.  And you guessed it, their real-estate agent had his hands in the cookie jar to get his commission. 

Doesn't seem fair does it?  Hard earned equity gone to someone who didn't sell the home.  So my sister took control of the situation.  If she would have done this at first and sold it privately they would have kept that hard earned equity.

SAVE REALESTATE COMMISSIONS

Realestate agents take about 6-7% of the sale.  Let's do a quick exercise:

Take the value of you home and multiply it by 6 or 7%. 

For example:
$150,000 x 6% = $9,000
$150,000 x 7% = $10,500

You decide for yourself if it is worth the hassle of getting a real-estate agent involved.  This means:

• having someone else show your home who doesn't have the compassion that you do, and may not know or understand the benefits of your home
• having someone act as a middleman to negotiate the price of your home with the buyer.  

This is a lot of money for such a service.   My feeling is that this fee is outrageous.

Here is a quick analysis on the home I sold in Regina:

Sold for approx. $125,000
Total cost of advertising: $50.00 (it sold in a day, so cost was not too high)
Commission on $125,000 @ 6% = $7500.00
Hours it took me to get ready to sell my home and show it: 16 hours

Final Calculation:

$7,500 - $50.00 = $7,450 / 16 hours = approx $465.00

I figure that by selling my home privately I made $465.00 per hour.  I worked 16 hours and saved $7,450.00.   Now wouldn't that be nice to make everyday?

WOW!!

LOWER PRICE MEANS YOU CAN SELL FASTER

My sister thought that by going with real-estate, their home would sell faster.  This could not be further from the truth.  In fact, it is the opposite.  By listing it with real-estate could cause you a delay in selling your home.

You will need to inflate the asking price of your home.  After about 2-3 months of people coming through your home, you will realize that your price is too high and you will have to drop it in order to sell it.   If you sold it privately, you could have asked this price in the first place and sold it in a lot less time.  Now you get that price but have to pay real-estate commissions on top of that.  Not really a WIN-WIN situation?