Challenges of Selling For Sale By Owner

​With the real estate market being as hot as it is right now, some potential home sellers are considering the route of selling For Sale By Owner. While this can, at times work out to the sellers benefit, on average most sellers fare much better when using the professional services of a Realtor.

There are certainly challenges that you will encounter when going on your own. Here are several of them and how you could deal with them:

1. Pricing - most sellers who go it alone tend to either over price or under price their homes and both situations result in a lower overall selling price and can affect the time it takes to sell a home. Consider using the services of a professional real estate appraiser. It's their job to accurately price homes.

2. Offer Price - most buyers, when considering a For Sale By Owner home, assume that you are just trying to save the real estate commission and automatically deduct that from their offering price before determining what they will actually offer. This starts you out in a hole that is harder to negotiate out of.

3. Communication with the Buyer - without the services of a Realtor as an intermediary, sellers are confronted with having to handle some of the more "personal" aspects of the transaction themselves such as dealing with financing, creditworthiness, and other issues.

4. Negotiation - while some sellers can be quite good at this, on the whole, most people aren't properly equipped to negotiate on their own behalf with total strangers. 

5. Keep it professional - in the end, this is a business transaction. Emotions can be your own worst enemy but it can be difficult when you're dealing with your own home/castle.

In the end, the relatively small percentage of home owners who are successful at selling on their own find they don't realize the big savings they were expecting. Also dealing with such things as disclosures, inspections, counter-offers, etc. can be stressful.

If you do decide to go this route, contact us at 419-779-6229 and we'll send you our info packet that will help guide you through this process.