Sell House by Owner

For some people, the thought of selling their home without a real estate agent seems impossible. After all, a real estate agent can help in many ways, including:

• Valuing Your Home:

  Real estate agents have a wealth of local pricing info you can use. They can tell you what other homes sold for, comparing them to the number of bathrooms, bedrooms, and other factors your home and those recently-sold share in common. Then they will help you analyze this info, as well as how long those homes were on the market, to help you set a price that will help you achieve your financial goals in the right amount of time.

• Staging Your Home:

  First impressions go a long way in real estate, and having a home that looks great in pictures on a web site or when someone cruises past it on a Saturday afternoon is essential to generating interest among buyers. Your real estate agent will be able to provide lots of helpful hints for successful staging.

• Marketing Your Home:

  Of course it does not matter how great a home looks if no one knows it is for sale. Your agent will help by listing your home on the top local home-selling web sites, as well as with traditional tactics like eye-catching yard signs and informative brochures and print-outs.

• Negotiating with Buyers:

  Unfortunately, negotiating is a part of the selling process, and often a difficult part at that. But realtors use their experience to anticipate what sort of factors a buyer might negotiate on so you can be prepared, and can also use their experience to guide you towards how to react to different requests.

• Guiding You Through the Sales Process:

  Speaking of guiding, selling your home is not an easy task and there is a great deal of coaching a realtor can offer so that you know what to do and when to do it. From putting it on the market to closing, this guidance can be quite helpful.

 

But while those benefits can be quite valuable, they do come with a cost!

According to Upnest.com, the average real estate agent commission rate in the greater St. Louis area is 5.2%. That may not seem like a huge number on the surface, but consider this: you will likely have many other expenses to pay for when selling your home, such as:

• Paint, grass seed, and other items to improve the interior and exterior look of your home
• Self-storage solutions or dumpster rental for decluttering purposes
• Contractor fees for repairs mandated by the inspector
• Repairs or other considerations requested by your buyer
• Closing costs

So you are not just paying that 5.2% to a realtor, you are paying it on top of all these other fees. You can see that the profit you hope to make from selling your home evaporates rather quickly before you even add in the real estate agent’s fees.

But what can you do to be less reliant on a real estate agent? You can actually sell the house as the owner, and doing so might even be easier than you realize.

There was a time when the local newspaper was the first and only destination for shopping for a new home. But in the digital age, you can easily secure a high visibility web presence to list your home without the expense of a newspaper ad, and without worrying about the large real estate agents crowding out your ad based on their larger advertising budgets.

You can also buy your own for sale by owner signs from the local hardware store, or order those online. Printing out one sheet info packets on the residence can be done yourself through your home printer, or you can purchase attractive printouts relatively inexpensively through an area print shop. As you can see, marketing the home can be done rather simply without a realtor’s assistance.

What about the steps of staging the home and navigating the sales process, including negotiating with buyers? Doing those things yourself does not require a daunting amount of specialized knowledge, so these are certainly things you could take on yourself. But what if you didn’t have to stage the home? And what if you didn’t need to negotiate back and forth with a buyer over repairs and other costs?

That might sound too good to be true, but the reality is you can sell your house as an owner on an as-is basis to an experienced home buyer like FasterHouse. Buying homes in as-is condition means we do not require the house to be staged or for repairs to be made. It really does remove the staging and negotiation from the picture!

You will still be able to avoid the realtor fees, and like an agent, we can guide you through the sales process. We can use the local connections we have built up over the years to help identify a great title company to close with so that we can get cash into your hands for your home.

Does avoiding real estate agent fees, not staging the home, not negotiating over repair requests and pricing, and still getting assistance during each step of the sales process sound inviting to you? If so, contact FasterHouse to get started today on a better way to sell your house by owner. Just call 314-926-0660 or fill out this form.