For Sale By Owner Homes

For Sale by Owner Homes listed in the
Realtor MLS for as low as $299!

       Marketing Tips

Marketing is more common sense than rocket science. If you understand these key points and follow this advice, you will be more successful than if you hired a 6 percent agent.

Exposure and Price – the two most important factors

Exposure

The Internet has shook-up all types of age-old business models and the real estate industry is no exception. Selling your home on your own has never been easier and more effective. And getting listed on MLS with For Sale By Owner Homes gives you same (or more) exposure that you would get with a 6 percent agent.

You need to be on the local MLS where all the local Realtors can find your property, and you need the exposure of the hundreds of local and national websites that will display your MLS listing where your buyers are actively searching. You'll get all this valuable exposure when you are listed in MLS with For Sale By Owner Homes. But it won't cost you 6%.

Pricing Your Home

The most common mistake sellers make is over-pricing their home. If you aren't sure what the price should be, get a CMA (Comparable Market Analysis), which will tell you what comparable homes have sold for in your neighborhood. You can get a CMA from the broker assigned to you, or directly from us.

The first week that your home is on the market, it will capture the most buyer attention. If you over-price your home, you'll miss out on the first wave of buyers. If you price it right, you are more likely to get your full asking price in the first week than at any later time in your listing term. This is because buyers are the most worried about "losing" the home to another buyer when it's a new listing.

Successful listings

Photos - online homebuyers pay more attention to homes with multiple photos online.

Ease of showings - make it as easy and convenient as possible for buyers and agents to see your home. Ask your local For Sale By Owner Homes broker what the most common showing method is in your local area, and "go with the flow".

Show it Right - Follow our Staging Tips to get buyers more motivated to make an offer

Free Online Listing - Use your For Sale By Owner Homes free online listing to your advantage. Put the direct link to your home on your flyers and any other advertising materials. It's better than directing buyers to a public MLS website where they will see your competition.

Other Marketing Tools - Some Useful; Some Pointless

Yard Signs

Yard signs account for 8% to 10% of all home sales, so you don't want to be without one. But keep it professional and avoid the cheap red and white "For Sale By Owner" signs with the phone number in magic marker. If your For Sale By Owner Homes broker can provide a professional Realty company sign, use it. Otherwise, you can get the professional look by ordering a sign custom made from a local sign shop. Your typical plastic sign with vinyl lettering will cost you $25 - $30. Get the frame from Home Depot for about $14.

Open House

Holding an Open House is a waste of time if you're the seller, but it won't hurt or cost anything either. Most of the "potential" buyers that will parade through your home are your neighbors and other sellers who are checking out the competition. An open house is more of an opportunity for an agent to promote him or herself by establishing business relationships with the people who visit the home. It's a great way for agents to get more listings and meet potential buyers who are just getting their feet wet.

Also, when an agent boasts she or he will send out hundreds of mailers promoting your home, it only benefits the agent and his or her brand more than anything else. In essence, the agent is trying to impress you that he or she is "marketing" your home by snail-mail spamming your neighbors.

Newspapers

Have you heard the news? No one reads newspapers anymore. Newspapers have been sweating it out, slashing their budgets and losing readership year-after-year somewhat commensurate with Internet growth. 

Online versions of newspaper ads for homes for sale are typically placed by investors and offer some lease-option or "lease to own" gimmick directed at buyers with bad credit and no money. If you place an ad in any newspaper, you can expect to attract those kinds of "buyers", and lots of annoying calls from real estate agents who want your listing.

Free Real Estate Magazines

Those free real estate magazines you find at the supermarket are a joke. First, your ad would be small and tell a buyer very little about the house. Often agents will omit details in an effort to get calls, but it's really more of a turn-off for buyers. This forum generates ad revenue for the publisher and promotes the agent and his or her brand. The ads are always outdated, since the time between print and consumer pick up can be months.

How home shoppers found the homes they bought with the internet

The internet is responsible for 80% to 90% of all homes sales nationwide. Of those homes sold, 84% are the result of buyers initiating searching on one of the thousands of public websites across the country that display MLS listings, and 14% from Realtors searching their local MLS databases.