Selling Quick By Fsbo..
I want to hear from rehabbers, what was the quickest time they sold their properties For sale by owner.. Is selling the property with in a month possible?
Also i was thinking providing my buyer with financing so we can close quick..I know a bank that can close in a decent amount of time. i will let buyer go through them to speed up the process..
How does this sounds??
Put a sign in the front yard, answer your phone, put directional signs in the neighborhood to the major streets, advertise in the correct medium (newspaper, pennysaveer, thrify nickel, etc) for your area.
I have very mixed results with FSBO. And most of the time I do a FSBO I would have gotten a higher selling price if I had gone with a realtor.
I have also done flat fee listings. Pay $89 and get listed in the MLS. You have to pay a commission to the buyers agent.
I am new to this. But in the past I have sold house and one vacant land. I would like to share what i experienced. The house i sold was brand new, we built it and for the tax reason we decided to sell it. It was the bad time of the year(11/2001), we advertised on local newspaper for a few weeks, many phone calls from both buyers and agents. Some people showed big interest because they came back to look at the house for the second, third time, one signed contract around 1/2002 and back out of deal saying could not get mortgage. We got scared a little and eventually ended up listing the house with the agent for 5% commission. it did not sell that fast either. But anyway, the deal was eventually closed in 05/2002, so it took us almost 6 months. we asked for $429k and sold it for $404k and then minus commission and transaction fee etc, you can do the math.
The lot we bought righ before we decide to sell the house. We were thinking to build another one. We bought the lot in 8/2001, and then we bought another house in 2002, after holding the lot for 2 years we decided to sell the lot in 5/2004, again we put it on the newspaper for a week only, lots of phone calls and showing and got it under contract in a month and again the guy back out of the deal, we kept $500 earnest money. Two months later, a guy who heart this from my landscaper that i have a lot for sale and happed he knows my husband so finally it went under contract again and closed in early september of 2004.
There is no success story here, i used agent and did FSBO, it alll took a long time since people back of the deal!!!
Try reading the book "How to sell your house in 5 days" - I forget who the author is, but it will give you a creative way to sell your house quickly and get a good price for it!
Good Luck!
[addsig]
I think it depends heavily on the property, how you do it and how quickly you need to sell. Most people seem to want to use realtors since they can get the word out alot better than you can.
On my last (and admittedly my first) rehab I sold it myself. We had a house on a street that completed the loop of the neighborhood. Since the street received a decent amount of traffic anyway we decided to put up a FSBO sign up while we were working on it to see what kind of interest we'd get. Had alot of interest off of that (we did wait until we had one room "done" so we could show what it would all look like when complete (this also gave us a good indication on if we were correctly priced). Once the rehab was complete we put in two newspapers ad's, had 2 weekends of open houses and sold it (using our completion date of the rehab as the start it took us 2 weeks to sell).
Personally I think that system works pretty well, the sign in the yard doesn't hurt anything, gets some interest and you never know if you'll get lucky (and save on agent fees). In our case we had an area with decent drive by traffic but since we had originally planned on using a realtor we set ourselves a firm deadline that if we weren't able to sell it ourselves within 2 1/2 weeks we'd hand it off. That time frame might be too short but I'd suggest you give yourself some kind of trigger or expectation so that if you're not getting the interest you need to sell it you know when to bring in a professional. It's certainly alot easier to do FSBO with easy to sell properties (good drive by traffic, hot neighborhoods etc) .
Also, don't assume that you're going to do a FSBO and save the agent fees. For one, you may have difficulty selling and need to bring in a realtor if you're not getting the traffic. Also, alot of buyers want an agent involved to make sure everything's taken care of. I had alot of interest from folks with buyers agents, all of them were willing to do 3% if they bought. Still saved me money which was the plan but it didn't eliminate the fees. Just build it in to your numbers regardless of whether you plan to sell yourself just in case and consider it extra profit if you're successful.
Another item to consider is price. One concern that's been mentioned is that realtors can sometimes get a higher price for your property. Probably true in some cases though if you're helping with financing you might be able to work some other angles (interest etc). In my case the sale price of a few thousand over asking (with a credit back to buyer giving me a full asking price) was a stretch on the appraisal so I don't think an agent could have done better.
my .02