Why It's Smarter NOT To Do "For Sale By Owner" When Selling Your Home

When you decide to sell your home, one of your first thoughts is likely, “how can I make as much money as possible from this sale?” While there are certainly many ways to increase your home’s value, including good staging and good listing techniques, some people try to increase their profits by selling their home themselves. Although this is certainly an option for selling your home, there are also many good reasons why you shouldn’t use this approach.

Higher Sale Price
One thing that real estate agents are quite good at is presenting your home to buyers in a way that increases the selling price. From taking high-quality photos to listing in the right places, this is one time when experience definitely matters. Plus, realtors have access to resources to let them know exactly what they can list your home for and still sell it quickly. Ultimately, this experience and knowledge helps realtors to sell your home for a much higher price than you’d typically fetch on your own. In fact, this higher price is typically more than enough to make up for the amount you’ll pay as the seller’s commission.

More Professional
Although buyers can obtain the assistance of a real estate agent to help them with “for sale by owner” properties, you may still find that buyers avoid your property in favor of agent-listed properties. In some cases, people may think you’re trying to hide something by avoiding an agent, even if that’s not the case at all. Plus, even when working with an agent, the mistakes that some self-sellers make can cause the selling process to take longer. Therefore, if a buyer is in a rush, they may ignore your listing.

Fewer Mistakes
The process of selling a home is quite complex. That’s why real estate agents have to train and study for quite some time before they can obtain their license. If you don’t have this training, the chances are fairly high that you’ll make some type of mistake at some point during the process. While some mistakes may only cause minor delays, other mistakes could cost you thousands of dollars, thus quickly negating any financial advantages of selling your home yourself.

Less Listing Opportunities
If you’ve ever searched for a home, you’ve probably started your search on one of the multiple online real estate websites. What you may not know, though, is that it is difficult to list a property on these websites unless you have access to the Multiple Listing Service. Unless you have access to this service, you have to list your property on websites individually, usually at a significant cost. Since your property won’t be listed on as many sites, you likely won’t get as many offers, meaning that your final selling price will be lower. Fortunately, real estate agents can access the Multiple Listing Service, making for a faster and more successful selling experience.

No Costs To Prepare
When you invite a real estate agent into your selling process, they suddenly have a vested interest in ensuring that your home sells for the highest-possible price. This means that they will utilize their resources to help your home sell quickly. If you sell your home yourself, though, you have to provide these resources on your own, which may all go to waste if your home doesn’t sell if it sells for a lower price than you had hoped for. Since agents don’t get any money from you until they sell your home, using an agent is a low-risk way to make the selling process as easy as possible.

Lack of Experience
Trying to sell your home yourself means that you’ll likely be selling it to someone who is represented by an agent. In other words, your lack of experience will be going up against a wealth of experience. Since the buyer’s agent only has the responsibility to look out for the buyer’s best interests, there’s no guarantee that they’ll play fair with you. Therefore, when it comes to negotiations for price, concessions, and other components of the selling process, you put yourself at serious risk of being taken advantage of if you try to sell your home yourself.

Less Time Wasted
Selling a home can be surprisingly time-consuming. Of course, if you’re getting paid to put in the time, it’s all worth it. However, if you’re trying to sell your home yourself, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to put your other responsibilities on hold until your home sells. Therefore, you’ll find yourself wasting a lot of time trying to get your home ready, all without being paid for the work that you put in. Rather than putting yourself through this stress, it makes much more sense to pay someone to take care of the process for you so that you can focus on your upcoming move.