competent assistance. An FSBO seller is analogous to self- performed dentistry or putting up a pro se (self-represented) defense in a murder case. The downfall of giving it a try yourself is that once you price a house, it’s easy to reduce the price, but nearly impossible to increase it without the herculean effort of starting a bidding war. If you get it wrong the first time, the only place to go from there is down, and you may end up selling for a lot less than the true value of your property. You might be a great sales professional in your own right and thoroughly knowledgeable in your own area of expertise, but unless you’ve gone through the rigorous training and education to become a licensed real estate professional, you don’t know what it takes to prepare, correctly price, market, and sell a home both quickly and legally. Yes, there are sales techniques that are transferable in any transaction, but a pharmaceutical representative wouldn’t know how to sell a house and a Realtor® would have a great deal of trouble deciphering the world of pharmaceuticals. In fact, both could get into a lot of trouble if they tried and made legal — or lethal — errors!
While you might think that “location, location, location” is all you need to sell your home, that’s simply not true. Yard signs only attract 10% of all home buyers. It’s even worse for print advertising; only 1% of buyers find their homes through newspaper marketing. You must employ a technically savvy marketing campaign to
compete with all dedicated websites, blogs, and social media advertising that bombard the Internet and attract buyers.
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