Must-Know Tips to Sell House By Owner

If you’re selling a house without a realtor, you need to invest your time into researching the best way to approach the sale. Your success will be dependent on how much you’ve invested in this strategy. 

6 Tips to Sell Your Home Without a Real Estate Agent

Often the practical steps to selling without a real estate agent are the ones that garner more attention among the FSBO community. But sellers rarely get an insight into the tips that realtors use to sell quickly and for asking. We lift that veil by introducing you to six tips that real estate agents implement or suggest their sellers implement when selling a home.

Prepare Your Documents in Advance

To list on the MLS, you need to have the correct documents. Therefore, take the time to prepare your documents in advance and digitize them. Ensure that you’ve uploaded all the necessary documentation well in advance. 

This includes:

• Original sales document
• Property title 
• HOA (if necessary) 
• Property tax bill
• State and federal disclosures
• Home inspection report
• Purchase offer and counteroffer forms

You may not need all these documents beforehand as you could get many of these docs — like the disclosure agreements — from a flat fee MLS service like Houzeo or Beycome.

Create Your Own Recently Sold Comps

When listing your home, real estate agents prepare comps — also known as comparables — that enable them to create the perfect strategy for selling your home. But since you’re selling a house without a realtor, the responsibility to develop these comps falls to you. Thankfully, comps are all information you can easily acquire and are readily available online.

To prepare these comps, you will need to research recently sold homes in your neighborhood.

Examine homes with similar specifications to your own: square footage, rooms, and condition. Then, use the general information you’ve garnered from these homes to create your selling strategy. These homes will help you decide:

• Your listing price
• Any necessary renovations or repairs
• What you should do for facade upgrades 

Rearrange Your Home to Suit a Universal Style

Your home should be appealing to the widest possible audience. Therefore, when compiling your comps, ensure you assess how those who’ve sold their homes have styled theirs. You can determine this by their property photography, as most real estate agents will advise their sellers to prepare their homes in a way that most accentuates the home’s best features.

You don’t need a real estate agent to understand how to make your home appear photogenic. Instead, you can use property photographs to help gauge how to spruce up your home.

Rearrange the furniture, especially in living spaces, where you want the space to appear roomy.

Declutter these spaces by packing away any extra pieces that could be overwhelming to buyers and perhaps invest in a few new decor pieces that make the home more neutral.

Before the photographer comes, you should also pack away family photographs as these make buyers feel distant and unable to connect with the property.

While you’re preparing for photographs, remember that buyers are having a tour of the house — so that should be what is most prominent, not your decor.

Segment the Space You’ll Use

If you’re selling a house, you know how important it is to allow potential buyers to view the property. But, that often means you need to keep the home in pristine condition while it’s on the market. If you have kids or pets, you know how challenging that can be. Therefore before you list, limit yourself to one or two “messy rooms.” Here’s where you’ll allow the kids to play and the pets to roam about freely. Then when you get a request to view the property, you only have to clean one or two rooms.

Then try to schedule the weekends and weekdays where you’ll allow viewings so you can prepare your home. In the days before scheduled viewings, live uncomfortably. Try not to make a mess in communal spaces: the kitchen and living room, and — if possible — avoid cooking. Instead, get convenient meals that don’t require too much cleaning up or eat at a relative or friends’ home. While you find it unnecessary, the odor that emanates from food can be offensive to some buyers. This is not something you want buyers to be repulsed by; rather you should work to make your home a blank slate.

Price Your Home to Sell

If you want a quick sale, you should price your home to sell. Here you can refer to your comp to find a price you’re happy with and one that reflects the market.

This is often where homeowners selling without a real estate agent fall short, as it is difficult to be objective without guidance from a third party. But, once again, the comps help you avoid being biased.

Choose a Competitive Buyer Agent Commission

Homeowners often don’t see the results they want or sell their homes at the speed they want because they offer below industry commission. When buyer agent commission is low, agents will often overlook these homes. 

Don’t be concerned that you’re spending on commission. A buyer agent commission is only a gateway to more buyer interest and can often lead to a higher sale price because you’ve attracted more buyers to the property.

If you’re wondering what sort of buyer agent commission you should implement, try to select one between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent. Because you’re saving on listing agent commission, you won’t even feel as though this is an unnecessary expense.

While you can forgo some of the tips in this post, it’s best to leverage all of them as that guarantees you sell at the asking price. Remember, selling a home is much like building one: each component relies on the other to function.