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> very fast sale of the house which we did without a realtor How did you find a buyer without a realtor? Are you able get into the listing databases without us

> very fast sale of the house which we did without a realtor How did you find a buyer without a realtor? Are you able get into the listing databases without using a realtor? Any special tips for selling without a realtor?

Wistar 5y ago
Sorry, I missed this comment. Actually, I have sold two homes without a realtor. Both times were flukes more than anything I really planned. The first time I mentioned to a co-worker that I was thinking about selling my (first) house. He said that he thought he could be interested. He came and saw the house and agreed on the spot to buy it. That was that. We established the price by asking the realtor who had sold us the house what the price should be and then reducing the price by an amount that was 50% of what the standard sales commission would have been. In essence, we split what would have been the commission with the buyer. We also split the cost for a real-estate attorney — a few hundred dollars, total — and got it done in just a few days. The second time was a little more planned. I carefully photographed the house and painstakingly built a website for it with tons of description. Whether or not we hired a realtor, I thought a website would help us sell. This was early 2001, a web presence for a house for sale was still fairly rare. We contacted the same realtor who had sold us our first home and asked her for a market value for the house. I offered to pay her a fee for her expertise and she declined saying that she knew we'd end up hiring her anyway, and that, "You may have sold your first house on your own but you'll never be able to do it twice." A few days after the website had gone up, I decided to put a small "for sale" sign in the yard and, no joke, as I was pounding the sign into the ground, a passing car stopped and, longer story short, within a few hours she and her husband agreed to buy the house. The husband was a building contractor and he was especially impressed by the aforementioned inspection report. As we had done with our first house, we set the price at market minus half the commission so it was well-priced. We hired the same real-estate attorney who put the sale together. It was super easy and done around the buyer's kitchen table in a single two-hour meeting, followed a few days later by an official closing at an escrow company. Now that the market in our area is smoking red hot, I am pretty sure we could sell our present home on our own too. We might miss out on bidding war wins but, I think, in the end, we'd come out okay.

Wistar 5y ago

Sorry, I missed this comment. Actually, I have sold two homes without a realtor. Both times were flukes more than anything I really planned. The first time I mentioned to a co-worker that I was thinking about selling my (first) house. He said that he thought he could be interested. He came and saw the house and agreed on the spot to buy it. That was that. We established the price by asking the realtor who had sold us the house what the price should be and then reducing the price by an amount that was 50% of what the standard sales commission would have been. In essence, we split what would have been the commission with the buyer. We also split the cost for a real-estate attorney — a few hundred dollars, total — and got it done in just a few days. The second time was a little more planned. I carefully photographed the house and painstakingly built a website for it with tons of description. Whether or not we hired a realtor, I thought a website would help us sell. This was early 2001, a web presence for a house for sale was still fairly rare. We contacted the same realtor who had sold us our first home and asked her for a market value for the house. I offered to pay her a fee for her expertise and she declined saying that she knew we'd end up hiring her anyway, and that, "You may have sold your first house on your own but you'll never be able to do it twice." A few days after the website had gone up, I decided to put a small "for sale" sign in the yard and, no joke, as I was pounding the sign into the ground, a passing car stopped and, longer story short, within a few hours she and her husband agreed to buy the house. The husband was a building contractor and he was especially impressed by the aforementioned inspection report. As we had done with our first house, we set the price at market minus half the commission so it was well-priced. We hired the same real-estate attorney who put the sale together. It was super easy and done around the buyer's kitchen table in a single two-hour meeting, followed a few days later by an official closing at an escrow company. Now that the market in our area is smoking red hot, I am pretty sure we could sell our present home on our own too. We might miss out on bidding war wins but, I think, in the end, we'd come out okay.