Personal Financial Advice from a former Certified Financial Planner
It’s Monday and no showings. That is to be expected. Most [tag]realtors[/tag] end up working both Saturday and Sunday so they take Monday off which isn’t a very popular day with clients for showings.
Let’s talk about the [tag]sign[/tag] in your yard.
Sunday and two showings. Not too shabby. Overall, 7 showings for our first weekend on the market. We’ll take it. So far, no one seems shocked at the price which is good. We had to set our price in a bit of a vaccum since no one has sold a house in our neighborhood in a while. Otherwise, everything is pretty normal.
Saturday and we’ve ended up with 5 showings. Not bad for a first weekend on the market considering how things are going in [tag]real estate[/tag] right now and the fact that it is still early April. Actually we weren’t really looking at selling in April but it was important for us to get out there first to help set the price in our market. Here is how to handle showings when you are [tag]selling your own home[/tag].
Well, we’re officially on MLS. Whoo-hoo! Frankly, it’s been a bit of kluge, but I guess in the end it all works out. Our very first day we get a call from a realtor to setup a showing. My wife spoke with her and after setting a time for the showing my wife inquired as to whether or not she was a realtor. Generally you don’t stay at your house for showings. It helps the potential buyers see your home as their home if they don’t see the people that currently live there. Also, it keeps you from answering awkward questions. And, if you are very lucky, they may want to spend a lot of time going back and forth and talking about your house if they are very interested in it. However, we aren’t going to leave strangers alone in our house without a realtor. (The realtor is semi-liable and probably wouldn’t allow anything shifty. It isn’t worth the trouble for them.)
Hello scammers. Well, our house isn’t even on MLS yet, and already the scam punks are coming out of the woodwork. So far, I’ve gotten two emails from two different people who actually already own homes in my city but they live in another city and the market there is bad, so they are wondering if we could work something out. Yeah. You can make an offer, get a mortgage and buy my house. If you meant something else then no. I’m not sure, but I’m guessing this scam revolves around me getting all excited that someone is interested in my house only to get somewhere down the road where they have some "situation" that requires me to send them $10,000 to help clear up, but not to worry because they’ll give me my asking price plus $10K. Of course, there is no situation, no offer, and my ten-grand disappears. I also got someone who called and was headed down the road of asking me for some information like my bank account or Social Security before I noticed where she was going and got very cold. Then all of the sudden she "had something to take care of" and she …
We got our first showing today. It was someone who lives on our block as a renter and walked by the sign. The wife came without her husband because he has a travel job and won’t be back until next week. Seemed like she really liked it. The nice part is that as someone who already lives here we don’t have to explain anything about the neighborhood or why our house is worth more than one about 8 blocks away where the school boundaries change. How cool would that be if we just sold it right away from someone seeing the sign?
Today, we got our first phone call. It was from someone who walked by our house and saw the sign. No idea of how serious they were or weren’t, but it is still nice to get our first call. Still no MLS listing. The guys at Iggyshouse are either dragging their feet, or they aren’t as fast and on the ball as they say they are. Why did we use Iggyshouse? The main reason is the free online MLS listing. There are other services out there that offer to help you do you own For Sale By Owner. Most of them charge some sort of flat fee or deeply discounted percentage in order to help you sell your own home. How do they charge less? Well, some of them offer less services. For example, Assist2Sell offers a “direct to buyers” program which basically involves some signs and a web page (good luck with that!) But they also offer a “full-blown” MLS listing (whatever that is). No word on pricing on the web page which turned us off. Iggyshouse has no costs. How can they do that? Well, they also offer a buyers service where they act as your buying real …
Friday, and the frustrations begin. We have decided to use Iggyshouse.com (more on that next post) to list our house. The main reason? A free MLS listing. Just because you are hip and cool and willing to do all the leg work to sell your home yourself doesn’t mean that everyone is. In fact, the vast majority of people buying homes still use real estate agents. Whether using a Realtor is a good or bad thing we will not go into today, but if you want to sell your house and most buyers are using Realtors, then good marketing sense says that you should go where the Realtors are. And the Realtors are on MLS.
Quick history lesson (don’t worry this won’t hurt). Not long ago, the MLS system was coming under scrutiny for uncompetitive practices. Like most businesses when the heat got turned up they tried to see if they could get the problem to go away without actually having to change their very profitable business model. As it ended up, MLS opened up the system to BUYERS by letting member companies provide MLS listings to the public (hello realtor.com and so on). This was a shrewd move, because the heat did go away, and they are laughing all the way to the bank. Why? Because it is still a very closed system when it comes to SELLER access. In other words, there is no way for you, Joe Public to get your home on MLS directly. You have to go through a broker.
I’m personally selling my home right now, and blogging about the process here. So, I started wondering where I could find the same kind of thing elsewhere, particularly those who had sold their house without a real estate agent too. I am most definitely not talking about the barely disguised lies from the mouths of the “its so easy” or “make millions in real estate” sites, so the searches are tough. I did come across one really good setup at the My Money Blog. I haven’t had a chance to read every article and if you look at the list there is more to come, but from what I have read there is some good analysis here for the most part, even if not all of it will apply to my situtation. Check it out.
Day One. We will be listing our house tomorrow (Thursday) in the afternoon. Apparently this is a good time to go on [tag]MLS[/tag] because [tag]real estate brokers[/tag] will be looking to setup their weekend showings. But, it is not too early so that it doesn’t come up as "new" in the minds of some brokers (who apparently have short memories, I guess).
So today is about taking pictures and writing descriptions.
Today’s most important step is something that we didn’t have to worry about last time we sold a house just three years ago. Updating [tag]Zillow[/tag]!