I’m not sure about your area but where I live and everything I’ve heard from friends and family – real estate is hot. People are getting over asking price, very short due diligence periods, and houses are only staying on the market for days, if not hours. If you’re in the market to sell your home, you might be tempted to go the FSBO, or for sale by owner route. Realtor fees are often 6% paid by the seller, 3% to the buyer’s agent and 3% to the seller’s agent. Successfully doing FSBO could save you 3%, which depending on your home’s worth, it could add up to several thousand dollars. 

I’d love to share my experience on going the FSBO route, to give you a little clarity into what it actually looks like before going down that route. We attempted to sell our house going the FSBO route in early 2020, when the market wasn’t quite this hot, but still relatively strong I’d say. Here’s our experience with it! 

Why we did it

We’re certainly not real estate experts by any stretch of the imagination. Neither of us have our real estate license, and our grand total of property transactions is 4. However, as mentioned in a previous post, we had a pretty terrible living situation with a bad neighbor and their dog, and felt that we needed to move. We had only been living there about a year, and although the price had risen (thankfully!), we weren’t sure how much we could reasonably sell our house for. We knew that we’d have to pay 6% to realtors to help us out, and worried that 6% would really lose us more money than we were comfortable with. So, in an effort to save our investment, we decided to go the For Sale by Owner route and give it a shot, in hopes of saving 3% of the transaction cost. 

At that point, we had been through 2 real estate transactions, and felt comfortable enough to give it a go. 

What was easy about FSBO

To get our house ready, we started first by cleaning it up and getting it ready to be shown. We got rid of a bunch of stuff, stored away in the attic a bunch of stuff, and even bought a few nice pieces to help decorate it a bit more. Less of our tastes and more generic stuff that we thought we should well. The original photos from when we had bought the house a little over a year ago were still on Zillow, and we were able to re-use those, and supplemented them with some of our own. It was easy to get it listed on Zillow and Redfin, and pretty quickly we got some showings booked. 

I always said (and still maintain) that most buyers today do their home shopping on sites like Zillow, Redfin or Trulia. In the olden days, realtors would find and recommend houses via the MLS (multi-listing service) but that’s (in my opinion) been replaced by modern sites like Zillow. It’s rare in my experience to find a house listed on MLS but not on Zillow. The eyeballs came very quickly to our listing, as did the favorite/hearts. People were clearly interested in the house, which was great. After a few showings, we even staged 2 open-houses which once again was pretty easy to advertise on Zillow/Redfin, and people just showed up! 

We were pretty familiar with the buying process of submitting an offer, negotiating back and forth etc, so felt comfortable. We did get a few offers, some decent, some not so much, and we actually ended up going under contract after receiving an acceptable offer! All on our own we negotiated the offer and finally accepted it. We were beyond thrilled!

Unfortunately the offer didn’t stick, the buyers had a contingency that they would only buy our house if theirs sold, and they didn’t end up getting an offer as quick as they’d like to. The buyers cancelled the contract and we were back at square one. 

However, all things considered, it was a lot easier than I had expected. Listing, showing, getting offers all went pretty well in our experience! 

What was hard about FSBO

Spoiler alert, we ended up not ultimately selling our house FSBO, and later on hired an agent to help. I will say that as easy as it was to get people interested, it was a bit harder to keep them interested and to go through all the processes. There was a fair amount of administrative work scheduling showings, hosting the open houses, and reviewing the legal language in the offers. We didn’t even get to the inspection process, which would have been more back and forth around scheduling visits, which sometimes can be a lot. 

Real estate can be such a complex transaction with so many little things to think about that honestly I feel that a professional is a great resource to have watching your back. Doing FSBO, the buyer’s agent doesn’t care how much money you get or how quickly things move or how many repairs need to be made – they are representing their buyer and their buyer alone. There can definitely be a lot of ‘gotchas’ and it’s honestly nice having a professional watch out for you, play some hard ball during negotiations and even deal with all the little things that need to get done. You’d hate to make a silly mistake that any good realtor would have caught.

Our agent definitely proved her worth and we were glad to have her. I almost feel like doing FSBO only showed us the easy part of the process and there would have been a lot more headaches, questions we would have had, and things to have gotten done had we continued on that route. 

Would I recommend FSBO

Short answer, no. Real estate is a huge transaction and not something you’d want to mess up. Unless you’re super experienced and real estate savvy, I’d worry about us (or you) getting screwed in the process because we didn’t know something or overlooked something. Realtors do a whole lot more than just advertise your house for you! Realtor fees aren’t cheap but in our experience, they really paid off!