Sell House Without A Realtor: Building a home out of a house is no small deal, and involves a lot of dedication and commitment from the side of all the members of a family. The most painful moment, therefore, comes when you have to abandon your house for whatever reason.
You may be moving to a new city or to a new apartment, and you might be left with the option to sell a house without a realtor.
However, you do not wish to involve a realtor to sell your house. Or, perhaps, you have tried contacting a few realtors and are unwilling to pay the high fee they charge for the job. Whatever the reason may be, if you are bothered about the situation, you might be spending a lot of time asking or researching the same question.
Can You Sell Your House Without a Realtor ?
The answer to the question is a tricky one. It is neither a complete yes, for the fact that you would probably be missing out on a lot of assistance. It is not completely no either, because several stages are possible to accomplish only by one’s hard work, efforts, and patience.
According to research by the National Bureau of Economic Research, you perhaps do not need a realtor or agent for the process. The study was based on a number of families who were able to sell your house successfully in Madison. They considered both families who made sales independently and through realtors and found that the prices they availed did not bear any considerable differences.
The only difference that remains is that a realtor or agent would charge you anything between 3 to 6 % of the price of the house as a commission for his job.
This would mean extra expenses for you, which you definitely wouldn’t want to incur, would you? However, it has been a common finding by a report by Zillow that about two-thirds of the people who attempt to sell your house actually face failure. Perhaps it would be better if you went through this article and found out for yourself whether the ‘For Sale By Owner’ or FSBO suits you or not.
What Do Professional Realtors Do To Sell Your House?
- They help you get a genuine yet reasonable price for your house. The realtor has a fair idea of the market, considering it is a local realtor you have hired for your service.
- They are also well-versed with the ups and downs of the market, the trends in sales, recent patterns as far as the comparative sales are concerned. Besides, after analyzing your demands, needs, and other factors, they can come up with a reasonable yet accurate price that you can avail of for your house.
- They play an important role in advising you about the house. In case there are any issues with your house that might act as obstacles in the process of selling, the realtor, with his experienced eye, can help you identify any glitches that need to be taken care of.
- They help you in making your home presentable for the process of showing it to prospective buyers. This, again, requires some experience with the market and with handling customers. The realtor might be able to advise you on the cleaning and decluttering process, as well as with the process of staging your home for the sale.
- They take care of the proceedings, such as listing, marketing, and drawing customers. This usually involves several steps: taking quality photographs of your home (interiors and exteriors), produce a property description, adding the property details to the MLS and so on. Besides bringing customers, they might also play a role in the negotiations of the pricing of the property.
- They play an important role in the closing process of the sale. Since there can be multiple legal actions and requirements involved, a realtor has adequate experience as well as multiple contacts for facilitating the same easily.
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How To Sell Your House Without an Agent?
Now, we come to the most important question. How do we eliminate the need for a realtor and take up all the multiple roles he carries out? How do we ensure that everything goes right even after we choose to give the realtor or agent a miss in the process of selling our house? Well, it is important to go through the following steps for the same.
Conduct Market Research And Set a Price to Selling a House without a Realtor
The first and foremost step that you want to get right to make sure everything else falls in place would be conducting proper market research and making sure you have set a realistic price for your home.
You need to remember that your emotional attachment to the house is not going to affect its market price, which is going to be affected solely by physical factors. You can use either or all of the four ways mentioned below for conducting the research:
Review Recent Comparable Sales in the Locality:
If there have been any comparable house sales in your locality or in nearby areas that you are aware of, try to review their statistics. This will give you a fair idea of the market situation in your place.
Use online evaluation Sites:
These days, there are many websites available online that can help you derive a near accurate analysis of your property’s value, generally free. Just keep in mind that they are merely estimates and could be missing the point by several dollars.
Take Help From a Real estate Agent:
Instead of appointing the real estate agent for the entire process from beginning to end, you could choose to make use of his experience and technical knowledge. By hiring the realtor, you are making sure a detailed study and estimate of your house is being prepared, and the value you demand is fair and accurate.
As a downside, however, the agent might actually hope you would want to list with them, or he might give you a false (higher) estimate of your property so that you agree to list with them.
Appoint a Professional Appraiser:
If you are looking for an accurate and honest estimate of your property, this would be the best step of all. Hiring a professional appraiser could be conducted even when there are actual customers on the go, instead of doing this first thing itself.
The only issue would be the additional costs the hiring would incur. The appraiser can ask for a hefty fee for making the estimate report in lieu of their hard work, which you might be a little hesitant to pay.
Setting The Home Ready For Sale:
After the first step is over and before you have listed your house out for sale, you need to make sure it is ready for sale. This would involve: decluttering, cleaning, and cross-checking.
Begin by decluttering the home. You could choose to do this yourself, or take help from either a friend or a professional for the same. Make sure you do not let any object remain that does not go with the vibe of the house. After all, you are preparing the home for its best presentation.
You could either choose to keep the rejected items separately for your use later or you could conduct a sale of sorts for the items you no longer need. You could also use the multiple shopping websites to list any items that you want to sell your house off and get attractive prices for the same.
This is to be followed by thorough cleaning of the house. Again, you might choose to do it yourself, or you might want to hire a professional for this step. There are websites that offer you such assistance for very reasonable prices.
Eventually, you would want to have the house inspected either by a friend, colleague or by hiring a realtor himself for the part. where they would be asked to identify any visible issues. Ask them to behave just like prospective clients in their ways and attend to their queries, issues and complaints with care.
At the end of it all, you need to make sure that the essence of the house is retained, along with the proper presentation in terms of wall paints, furniture, appliances, fixtures, and items of décor.
Marketing and Advertising: How to Sell your House without a Realtor
You need to start off first by gathering enough data about your own house – all the relevant logistics. Following this, you will have to click some great photographs of the place, preferably the ones that highlight its uniqueness and charm.
You can now list your home on the MLS, for it is easy, quick and dependable. You can choose to advertise the house on other platforms, such as social networking sites, on print media such as newspapers and pamphlets, and even on posters for better visibility.
These days there are special FSBO websites that take care of such advertising and campaigns. You might choose to advertise your property on the same forum.
Negotiating with Prospective Buyers and Finalizing:
After your house features in the open books, it receives requests and visits and it is time to show your place around. This also means that the scope of negotiation and bargain begins right away.
people come to take a visit and make their offers after having a thorough look. Make sure to let the customer know their benefits of buying the house from you, even if you are not physically present during the seeing.
You might choose not to respond to very low offers. You must prefer waiting for the right customer if you are offering unfair or very low prices. With time, you are sure to crack a better deal.
This is followed by the step where the legal actions are taken after you have finally found a buyer. This is the stage where you will again need a technical expert for the process yet again. You could help from a realtor or a person with good experience and knowledge in such technical and legal matters.
There are processes such as title search and insurance policies to be covered, where you would want to take a professional’s advice.
Handling The Closing Of The Process:
The closing of the process is a difficult bit again. You need to make sure all the patchwork, paperwork, and legal actions have been taken care of. You can do this with the help of a sufficiently knowledgeable person in the matter. There are particular acts to follow by law, which we need to understand.
You are free to appoint an escrow agent or a real estate agent or both for assisting the processes. Besides, you could just opt for a single broker to take care of everything single-handedly; just that the option doesn’t seem too safe. Depending on the various assistance and services you have chosen for the entire process, you need to make sure to pay commissions and incentives to all the contributors.
Final Thoughts:-
You could also use a website instead of technical professionals. Yet several of the descriptions on the internet are fairly explain and one can understand.
This is why the best idea would be to take the assistance of a professional in the process. It doesn’t matter if you do not have a realtor to guide you. Yet there are a few stages where their experience and contacts are mandatory for a successful sale.
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