When I started in the real estate business, I made a good living chasing FSBOs. I would call them, find out what price they were asking, and determine whether I could sell the home for more on the MLS. I sold a lot of homes and netted the former FSBOs more money in their pocket. That’s because I’m a real estate agent, and the sellers were not. It really is that simple. Unless you’re a real estate agent selling your own house, you’re entering a complex financial and legal transaction without 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 real estate agent 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
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