Why You Should Sell By Owner

Selling your home ‘by owner’ is the ultimate good buy for any homeowner.

Traditionally, real estate agents charge commissions of 5% to 6% of the purchase price. That’s $5,000 to $6,000 deducted from every $100,000 of the sale price!

In a post-real-estate-bubble world of shrunken equity, that’s real money. For many people, $5,000 spells the difference between getting a check at closing and bringing a check to closing.

For many homeowners, using a real estate agent or selling ‘by owner’ is a matter of simple arithmetic. If they hire an agent, most or all of their equity evaporates into the commission. If they do much of the work themselves and sell ‘by owner,’ they keep most of that equity.

You Can Sell Your House Yourself

That the real estate commission structure is so inefficient and ineffective, yet so persistent, is a conundrum that is attracting the attention of researchers at Stanford and the folks behind Freakonomics. We’ve summarized their dissection of the economic rationale for selling ‘by owner’ in “The ‘By Owner’ Business Case."

Real estate agents like to say that just like you go to a doctor because you don’t have a medical degree (unless, of course, you do), you should go to a real estate agent for the relatively infrequent transaction of buying or selling a home.

There’s a big difference: selling a home isn’t brain surgery. The process of selling a home by owner isn’t complicated, especially once you understand the timeline.

Selling you home by owner is easy

Selling ‘by owner’ is like any other home improvement project. In fact, you could say that selling ‘by owner’ is the ultimate home improvement project, because you actually get to take it with you, in the form of the equity you saved by selling ‘by owner.’

ForSaleByOwner.com makes it easy, with tools like our staging-to-closing checklist.