Sell My House Blog
Biggest problems sellers encounter when selling their property through traditional methods
- Selling Your House For Sale By Owner – is not as simple as it seems at first sight.
In order to save money on realtor commissions, many people try their luck selling their house on their own. They usually hop on a FSBO.com or Fizber.com or Zillow.com and list their home as For Sale By Owner, hoping to speak to sellers themselves directly and negotiate a better deal without having to pay commissions to real estate brokers.
The biggest problem all For Sale By Owner Sellers encounter is the flood of calls they receive after they list their house for sale.
-They literally become a target for all real estate agents who start calling them in hopes to convince them of listing their house with them.
-They get many calls from real estate marketing services, who hunt for all and any kinds of seller leads, because they sell those leads to real estate investors.
-They also get calls directly from real estate investors who low ball them and offer them insulting cash prices.
-Sellers get so many calls, they get overwhelmed by it. They eventually end up ignoring all calls or discontinuing the listing.
After doing it for several weeks, usually For Sale By Owner Sellers end up listing their house with an agent anyway. And have real estate brokerage handle the selling of their home for them and agree to pay the commission, in exchange of having no stress of dealing with dozens of random callers on daily basis.
All in all, selling your house as For Sale By Owner is a great idea and can save you money. But in general you have to be a little more experienced in real estate and have a prescreening mechanism in place to weed out all the low ballers, otherwise you can go crazy from the amount of calls you will get. Especially today, when everything is on the internet and your phone number is accessible to people all over the world!
2. Common Issues When Selling Your House Using A Realtor
First and foremost downside selling your house while using a realtor is cost and time doing it. Realtors usually lock you into the contract ranging from 3 to 6 to 12 months. And usually give you zero guarantees that they will sell your house doing it. Once you sign the contract you can not just exit out easily, unless you negotiate that up front. Then most of the time, the realtor who listed your house, doesn’t really do much to sell it anyway. He just lists it and hopes that some buyer or buyers agent will find it on MLS (multiple listing service) and will come buy it from him.
Its a very passive selling approach. Which might work great if its a sellers market. But if the market isn’t all that “hot”, then your house will just be sitting there on market for several months without you being able to do anything about it (because of the contract) and you will have to wait for the contract to expire, or keep lowering the listing price or hope someone will appear out of nowhere to buy it, while still making your mortgage payment in the meantime.
In other words depending on the market conditions, your area, and condition of the house, selling my house with a realtor may not be the best option for you, especially if you are looking to sell your home fast!
Plus, selling your house with a realtor is the most expensive way to sell your house. You have to pay all the closing costs, you have to pay inspection fees, appraisal fee, all other fees, including realtors/brokers commission on both sides. In total selling your house with a realtor may cost you upwards of 10% if not higher depending on the state you live in.
What is my house worth?
One of the main questions people ask is: I am getting ready to sell!!! I want to sell my house, but what is my house worth?
That is a legitimate question and is not quite easy to answer but here are some tips to get closer to the real value of what the house worth!
- Get the market comparables (Comps). The value of the house or any other item is usually determined by what other people are willing to pay for it. So taking a look at your neighborhood and comparing houses that have been sold recently is a great idea to start.
- Compare prices of recently sold houses, not what homes are listed for and also not the ones that are sale pending, because the real data is in past sales, not what people want to get for their homes when they list them. Of course people always want to sell their house for more and try to get highest price possible, but that doesn’t mean it will sell for that much. so focus on sold homes only.
- get the radius of sold homes, try to go into a neighborhood as close as possible. if the property is in certain development community with all homes built 5 years ago, you don’t want to compare those to the neighborhood outside that development that maybe houses that were built 50 years ago. location matters a lot. neighborhoods maybe similar but they are not same and that may influence price as well.
- bedrooms and bathrooms matter, but not as much as an actual square footage of the living space inside the house. of course number of bedrooms and bathrooms matters, but square footage matters more, because if a person wants they can always knock down some walls or put up new ones to create their own design and a number of bedrooms they desire! it would be a lot bigger project to try to add square footage to the house after it has been built already! So square footage is more important, yet bedrooms and bathrooms in many cases will also play a big role in comparing houses when you’re trying to find out what is my house worth!
- other factors that can give you clues is type of home. two story home is not the same as a ranch style house and should be compared appropriately with similar style houses.
- Also things like garage and lots size is important to pay attention to as well.
- all in all these are pretty much the basic most important criteria when trying to assess what the house is worth. But only roughly!
- if you want a detailed and more precise way of getting your house valued. you can hire an appraiser service. these people will come out and do an in depth analysis of every little detail that your house has and how it compares to the houses that were sold recently. this service is not that expensive and probably runs a few hundred bucks, probably depending on how in depth you want it to be.
- however today with all data available on the internet with sites like zillow.com, redfin.com, realtor.com, etc. it is pretty easy to just hop on and get a general idea of what comparable sales and even look inside the homes, since most of them have lots of pictures attached to them on these websites!
- so put in a little bit of work online and then for even better understanding you can make a list of houses that were sold in area and drive to them to see with your own eyes of how they compare to the house you are trying to appraise and get even better idea if your house is similar to compare it with or not so much.
- so hopefully this is quick post answers your question of what is my house worth? if you do those things you can get a rough idea within 15-20 minutes. But at the end of the day, everything that is bought or sold is negotiable. it depends on many different factors like buyers or sellers market, state of economy, or perhaps a new arena or a shopping mall built in the area. all those things can influence and sway prices one way or the other! so do your due diligence and try to gather as much information as possible before you make your final decision!
- and if you’re looking to sell your house fast and need help, feel free to call us for a free consultation at 818-668-5333 or email us at info@sellyourhousecali.com. we buy houses and close fast so you can get on with your life and start your new chapter!