So, you’ve decided to sell you home one your own. This is commendable and can save you some money in commissions. This is not a small undertaking and we at the Novak Team want to give you 5 tips to selling your home on your own.

Download our For Sale By Owner (FSBO) kit

The first thing you need to do is download our FSBO kit. It has a ton of information. Everything ranging from who to use for escrow, what inspectors need to get lined up, what financing hurdles you need to be aware of, what an appraisal consists of, and how they all work together.

The FSBO kit will give you a roadmap to selling your home and hopefully assist you in avoiding some common pitfalls.

Price appropriately

Next is pricing. You can leverage us for pricing if you are curious about what we think your house should be priced at. One of the Novak Team agents will be more than happy to assist you, just shoot us an email or give us a call.

One thing we look at is the comparisons, or “comps.” We look at 5 active properties, 5 pending properties and 5 closed sales, all to get an accurate value for your home.

One thing to avoid is the 999-pricing strategy. For example, pricing your home at $399,000 will get your listing to show up in searches on websites such as ours, Zillow, or Redfin for people searching for homes valued between $300,000-$400,000. Your listing will not show up for someone searching for homes priced between $400,000-$500,000. This is called price bracketing, and it is very important in online listings. 91% of people find their homes online or are actively searching online, so getting it out to as many people as possible is extremely important.

If you price the same house in the example for $400,000, you will show up for people searching for $300K-$400K homes as well as $400K-$500K, which will double your exposure. Search engines round the numbers and you need to be aware of that when setting up your price.

Host an open house

Open houses are proven and efficient way to get many people to view a home. There are a few things that should be done to get the home ready for the open house, and we are glad to assist with that.

If you want us to help at your open house let us know and we will help you out for free. One of our agents will come out and assist in getting as many people through your home as possible. We offer this with no obligation.

Install a lock box

Availability is crucial to selling a home. The more the home is available to be shown, the better chance it has at being sold. When you list a home on your own, you do not have access to an MLS lock box that agents can access when you are not there.

This is another service we will provide for free. We will lend you a digital lock-box so real estate agents can access your home to show it when you are not available.

Another benefit is that we will have a digital log of everyone showing the home. We like to get feedback on what they thought of the home and reaching out to the agents visiting will meet that goal. The feedback can be used to make the listing more attractive and increase the chances of a successful transaction.

Signage

Signage at the property is necessary to benefit from the traffic in your area, it’s close to being free advertising, after the cost of the sign of courses. This is another area we can assist.

We will put a sign in your yard and respond to buyers for free. We have agents ready answer questions and show the home. We will always answer. This small thing is important. You are busy with work and family, it would be a shame to have a sale fall through because of a missed call.

Again, download the FSBO kit, it has a lot of information that will assist you in selling your home on by yourself. if you have any questions, reach out to us. We are eager to be an expert resource for you.