The second most common explanation for failure is a poor
plan. Even the most committed FSBO seller will not achieve optimum results from a
poor plan. There are a handful of common mistakes. Foremost is starting your
home selling efforts before you have formulated a complete marketing plan and educated or
prepared yourself enough to carry out the plan. Too many home sellers call Ms.
Classified before they do anything else. Before you run an ad or put up a sign, you
must do the research and educate yourself as necessary for you to understand the
issues you need to evaluate and then competently resolve them for yourself. They are
not overwhelming, but they must be focused on and dealt with in advance of inviting a
buyer to come see your home. For example, what type of repairs or redecorating
are best done before presenting your home for sale and what type are best left to be done
after you find a buyer. This decision will affect your asking price for the home in
addition to requiring contracting and scheduling the work, which all takes time and
planning before you start inviting potential buyers to come see your real estate.
Are you going to prepare the contract yourself or are you going to have an attorney
prepare it for you? Either way, you need to have a copy of one ready for the buyer
to sign on the dotted line at a moments notice. A good realtor is never found
without a contract form and several ink pens (just in case one runs out of ink after the
middle initial). Do you have a title or escrow company already selected to take
delivery of the contract and the buyers earnest money check to as soon as you find a buyer
to sign one? Too many FSBO sellers are simply not prepared to sell their home and
more than a few seriously interested buyers have just gone on down the road while an
unprepared FSBO seller was flipping through the yellow pages looking for a lawyer or a
title company when they should have been handing a signed contract and check to the escrow
agent. What is a competitive price for a home? Are you informed enough or can
you do some research to obtain enough information to competently make this decision or do
you need the assistance of a professional appraiser? A lot of FSBO sellers will call
a realtor to "talk" about listing their property with a view toward getting a
"free appraisal" and end up determining a price for a house based on what that
realtor told them. This could be a serious mistake. To start with a realtor is
not an Appraiser and may not be competent to estimate the value of a home. Also, the
realtors opinion, competent or not, may not be fully objective. Hypothetically
speaking of course, lets say there are 3 different realtors "talking" to
prospective customers about listing their property and the value of a house. Lets
say that one realtor will tell the prospective customer a "High" price in hopes
of impressing the customer with this realtors marketing skills so as to get the sellers
listing or because that realtor had not done enough research. Lets say that the
second realtor is competent enough and has done enough research and is somehow immune to
the forces motivating realtor's one and three and tells the prospective customer a
"Right On" price. Lets say a third realtor tells the prospective customer
a "Low" price because this realtor has read the realtors monthly testimonials
about how you can never be a "Million" dollar real estate agent unless you learn
the "art" of convincing your listing customers to sell low so that you can sell
a lot of property real fast. They say a realtor can "waste" enough time
trying to get an extra several thousand dollars in price for one property that
the realtor could have spent that time to sell two or three other properties "priced
low" and thereby earned a lot more commission. I am not suggesting, of course,
that any realtor would ever actually considers such factors. What I am suggesting is
that if you, the owner, are not informed enough about what home values really are, how do
you know the price someone told you is fair or not? If you price your property too
high, it could take forever to sell it. If you price the home too low, you loose
money. You can get Home Sale Prices for Homes Previously Sold in your area to assist
you with determining a fair price for your home Free at many local property tax appraisal
district web sites and many appraisers will sell you a competent and objective "paper
appraisal" for as little $150. Do your research, educate yourself fully, get
whatever professional assistance you need in advance, and then start developing your
marketing plan. There is a collection of interesting Books on the subjects of How to
"Dress Up" your house to Sell Faster and which types of Home Improvements
"Payoff" best at The Online Store.
The basic elements of a sound house selling plan are evident in
the methods the realtors use. Consider the realtors plan. Start with yard
signs that do not have the owners phone # on it. Why you ask, so that potential
buyers can be given complete information as to the details of the property and the
financial terms and thus be "qualified" as to that buyers real interest in a
specific property before time is spent taking the buyer into the home and providing
additional information pertaining to that property. This also saves the owner the
frustration of having to talk to a lot of buyers who are NOT interested in their
specific property. If the seller is not aggravated, the seller will probably
be more patient. This all suites the realtors just fine. The seller patiently
waits for their home to be sold and meanwhile back at the real estate office, since the
realtor has many other MLS properties to sell any potential buyer, they are not wasting
their time talking to these potential buyers that really have no interest in your
particular property. If a realtor had to pay you a commission for each potential
buyer the realtor sold other property to that called that realtor to start with because of
the real estate signs in your front yards, you might decide
to price your home Real High and leave it for sale permanently. A real estate sign
in your yard with the realtor's phone number on it is a meal ticket for the realtor.
Next the realtors put the property In Front Of All The Buyers All The Time. The
pool of potential buyers is an ever-changing mass. It exist all the time and yet
it's composition is never the same. Each day some potential buyers make purchases
and drop out of the pool while other new potential buyers crack open the classifieds or
yellow pages or drive down the street looking for signs for the first time. The
realtors keep all property in front of all buyers all the time with their
Realtors Co-Op known as MLS. The MLS Data base is there for all realtors to
work on when someone calls them after seeing the realtors phone # on a yard signs in your
front yard or an any ad that realtor had run. The consistency of keeping the
property in front of the buyers all the time and the breadth of its presentation to the
buyers such that most buyers have every day access to it are the essential elements of
this Realtors Co-Op. A FSBO seller does not usually advertise Every Day
(consistency) and when they do advertise they usually do not advertise in all or most
of the different local media (breadth). Also, the individual FSBO seller does
not benefit from the buyer who wants an 1800 square feet home who sees the FSBO seller's For
Sale Sign and calls about that sellers 2600 square foot house. The way for a
FSBO seller to make a conceptually solid marketing plan is to focus on the same general
principals as the Realtors Co-Op plan utilizes. This is where using our Seller
Advertising Co-Op comes to play.
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