- Do you wanna learn how to sell your house by owner?
Well, I'm gonna give you some tips.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to my channel, my name is Karin Carr
and I am a real estate agent with
Keller Williams here in Savannah.
But, there are many times when an owner
feels like they need to try to sell their house
by owner rather then hire a real estate agent
and it certainly is possible.
I'm not gonna tell you that it's not possible.
So here are the steps involved
with selling your house as a FISBO,
for sale by owner, to help you get started.
Number one, coming up with your asking price.
This is by far the most challenging thing
for a for sale by owner.
You need to figure out what your house is worth
based on current market value.
If you say, the guy down the street
sold his house for 320 last year.
A lot has changed in the last year.
The Savannah market has changed significantly.
A year ago in Richmond Hill, for example,
we had less than a months worth
of available houses on the market.
Now it's more like seven.
So, things have changed drastically.
You need to make sure that you
come up with a realistic asking price.
Number two, your house has to look great online.
You can not take pictures with your cell phone
and expect it to look fabulous on Zillow
and Realtor.com, and Trulia, and all the portals.
You're gonna have to shell out some money
for a professional photographer
if you really want the photos to look great online.
Number three, you're probably
gonna want to take a video as well.
Buyers love video.
They wanna see a virtual tour,
a walk through of the inside of your house.
If you just take a picture of the living room,
well that's great, it shows me the living room
but it doesn't show me the layout of the house.
Where is the kitchen in relation to the living room?
Is the master bedroom off of the living room?
They kind of want to see the entire floor plan.
So you're gonna wanna consider having a video as well too.
We get a ton of buyers in Savannah
that relocate here from out of state.
They're doing all of their initial research
online because they're not here
physically to see the houses.
So give them as much as you possibly can
to help them feel like they really
understand what the house looks like.
Number four, you're gonna want to have some disclosures.
As a real estate agent that is a member
of the Georgia Association of Realtors,
we have a form called The Sellers Property Disclosure
which is about seven pages of,
this is everything I can tell you about my house,
the good, the bad and the ugly.
This is how old the roof is.
This is how old the air conditioning system is.
Are you on public water?
Are you on septic?
Have you ever had a leak?
Have you ever had flooding?
Do you require flood insurance?
All those sort of things are things
that you wanna tell the buyers upfront
because, you don't want to not disclose
any flaws with the house.
Anything that would affect how much
they wanna pay for the house.
So for example, if you know that
every time it rains, the window
in the living room leaks because
the seal around the window is not so great
and you fail to disclose that,
when the buyers move in and the first time
there's a heavy rain and it starts leaking
and the guy comes to fix it and says,
"Oh, this has been going on for a long time."
You're gonna find yourself in a lawsuit most likely.
So you do not want to fail to disclose
any material defects within the house
that will later come back to bite you.
Number five, you're gonna figure out
how to advertise your property.
You can list your house for sale by owner on Zillow.
I wanna give you a little word of caution.
I did a video about this once before,
you should click on this link
and see what's gonna happen when you
list your house for sale on Zillow as a FSBO.
But you certainly can do it.
You can also put advertising in the newspaper.
You can run Facebook ads.
You can run ads on LinkedIn, all the social media platforms.
You can advertise it to your heart's content.
You can mail post cards to first time buyers in the area.
You can mail post cards to the 500 houses
within a one mile radius of your own.
There are lots of things that you can do for advertising.
This is May 2019, and in most areas of Savannah
we are leaning more toward a buyer's market
then a seller's market so, you're not gonna be able
to just put a sign in the front yard
that says for sale by owner and expect
to be flooded with offers.
You are going to have to advertise it
if you want to get people to come see the house.
Now let me tell you the downside
of selling for sale by owner.
The type of buyers that are gonna come see your house,
typically fall into the following categories.
They are either investors, they are
looking to buy your house for pennies on the dollar.
They want a great deal.
They're either gonna buy it and fix it all up
and flip it or they're going to keep it as a rental property
but they need to get it cheaply
in order to make it profitable for them.
Number two, you're gonna get a lot of buyers
who are not very cred worthy.
They can't get a loan so they're gonna say,
"Hey, if I buy the house from you
"would you like to finance it for me
"and I will just make my monthly payments to you?"
They will also try to say, "Could we do
"a lease with an option to purchase?
"I'm gonna rent the house from you
"and I will pay my monthly rental to you
"and then after a year or two
"when I fix up my credit score,
"then I can apply for a loan and then I can buy it."
This doesn't help you if you need
to sell your house in order by buy your next house,
because you need the down payment
from the sale of this house to buy the next house.
But that, you're gonna run into that a lot.
You're gonna get a lot of people
asking you to do a lease with an option to purchase
when you sell for sale by owner.
You're also going to have to be available
to do all of the showings.
So, if they want to come see the house
at 11 a.m. and you're at work,
you're gonna have to figure out
well, do I leave work and come show the house
or do I try to do it later in the evening.
And now, they don't wanna see it
because they're not available at that time.
It' makes it a little bit difficult
to coordinate the showings.
You will have to be present for all of the showings.
You certainly do not want to put a lockbox
on your front door and say, here's the code
just go on in whenever you can.
You might come home and find yourself wiped out.
So now I've told you how to sell your home by owner.
If you would like to see some examples
of how to stage your home on a budget,
click this like right here.
I did do a whole blog post once before
about ways to make your house
look fabulous when it's on the market
without hiring a professional stager
and spending thousands of dollars to do so.
Thanks so much for watching and I will
see you on the next one.
- Hey, I'm Dawn.
- I'm Nicole.
- And I'm Karin.
- [Group] And we are Georgia Coast Homes.
(upbeat music)