For Sale by Owners

For Sale by Owners...God love em!  I gotta say that because before I was a Realtor® I was one of them! Let me explain, I met my gorgeous wife in 2004 and shortly thereafter we were living together(well maybe 8 months or so later). We decided to build a place and move into something that was ours not just hers.

So in doing this we had to sell a house, this was 2006, we thought how hard could it be?! Houses were selling in 6 HOURS with NO conditions at this time so we thought lets put a sign on the front lawn, run some ads, and BOOM we were gonna sell our house! No PROBLEM, right??  WRONG?! We tried the for sale sign in the front lawn, then we went and listed with one of those FSBO websites, I won't mention who, but it starts with a We.

 Anyway, that did not get us the exposure we were looking for either, it seemed we got a lot of what we call in the industry "tire kickers". Tire kickers are people with no serious interest or ability in buying property, what they love to do is waste time.  This is what takes me to my quick little run in with a FSBO this past weekend. When I look for houses for my clients I  look at the FSBO websites as well as on Realtor.ca. I feel like if the FSBO is willing to work with Realtors then why wouldn't I suggest the FSBO house to my client as well?

 This is what happened last weekend, I found a property that I thought my client would like, called the owner of the house and made an appointment to view the townhouse at 10am on Saturday morning. We had a couple of other showings booked but I was on a pretty tight schedule, the owner of the house NEVER SHOWED UP!  Why on Gods green earth are you trying to sell your house on your own if you cannot even show up for an appointment to show it??

This is why I hired a Realtor® back in 2006, I was sick of trying to sell it on my own, waiting for people that would never show up, fielding phone calls from tire kickers, people knocking on my door wondering "how much", holding open houses and having the neighbors look through our closets, all of the things that you as an owner never ever know about when you HIRE A REALTOR®!! 

My point is this in case you might have missed it and it is two-fold, first if you are trying to sell on your own you will wind up paying commission at some point either taking it off the price when you sell private or you will pay it to ME when I bring you a buyer for your home. Second, if you continue to go the FSBO route and you have a Realtor® that has a buyer...SHOW UP for the damn appointment!  I know this sounds angry, believe me it is definitely not anger, take this as a little bit of advice from a guy that has gone both routes in selling a home! Incidently, when we finally did list in August of 2006 we sold in 6 days for 8k under our asking price!

That is all I have to say about that! Don't forget to check out my tweets on Twitter and check out my Facebook fan page!