Honest FSBO Advice

I know you are bracing for "My best FSBO advice is to use a REALTOR". You are cringing at the thought, thinking that Thousands of MY dollars are at stake here. You'd be right. Choosing to go FSBO (For Sale By Owner) means that you are choosing to do some or in many cases ALL or the work yourself... So let's look at it a piece at a time and see which pieces you REALLY want to take on and which you'd prefer to leave to a full service REALTOR.

Pricing--The simple? act of deciding how much you home is worth can be difficult. Lately the market has been all over the place. Some markets are up! Many are down. What you need here is an HONEST and FACTUAL answer about where things stand relative to the location AND CONDITION of your home. And bear in mind that this all has to correlate nicely with how fast you need to sell your home.

Let's see how those factors play together in a typical scenario:

We want to sell our house at 123 Main St. It is in average condition, but homes around it are in better shape. We need to move in three months. The intersection of the location, condition and the time frame all determine the marketing strategy and the pricing.

Since you need to move quickly, you need MAXIMUM market exposure. Simply putting a sign in the yard or an ad in the paper is not going to cut it if you have to move NOW. This means the power of the MLS, where you can get listed on HUNDREDS of real estate websites and be exposed to thousands of REALTORS.

Yes. You may end up paying 3% to a cooperating real estate agent bringing a buyer, but that is FAR better than not getting sold in three months in this scenario. Sometimes you take less money to get a home sold quickly.

If the condition of your house is at or less than the condition of similar homes, if WILL affect the price. There are NO automated online valuation tools that can adjust the value of the home for it's CONDITION relative to neighboring homes. Not possible. They have no idea of the condition of your home or for that matter any of the other homes currently on the market.

Finally, automated valuations cannot tell you what your neighborhood is doing. THEY CAN ONLY REPORT THE TRENDS AFTER THE FACT. You need a  REALTOR, an appraiser, or other QUALIFIED professional to assess these factors.

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