The housing outlook for the Charlotte, North Carolina housing market is looking up according to the Charlotte Regional Realtor Association. Closings were up 24% in March. But selling a home by owner in today’s market means doing 2 things right 1) Pricing your home and 2) marketing your home.
Charlotte area home prices are down 13% from 2008. That means you have to be aggressive in pricing your home for sale. One reason to sell by owner is to save the real estate commission. In a buyer’s market that means sharing that savings with the buyers.
By pricing your home competitively you’ll be among the first to sell and that means a lot with the availability of houses on the market in the Charlotte area.
Marketing a home for sale by owner takes a little bit of savvy in today’s market as well. Newspaper classifieds used to be the best and only way to market to a wider audience. Today, however, the Internet has made home marketing a whole lot easier and less expensive. For instance, you can now market your home to millions of potential home buyers by listing on the major real estate portals, like Realtor.com, Trulia.com, Zillow.com, Bloomkey.com and many others for a low flat-fee that’s far less expensive that the cost of weekly ads in the newspaper.
For more information on listing your Charlotte area home by owner on the major real estate websites, visit Real Estate For Sale By Owner .
Selling by owner means marketing your home to the largest group of potential buyers possible. But you don’t want to pay so much for marketing that you might have been better off selling with a real estate agent.
Reaching home buyers today is much easier than it was just a few years ago. Over 80% of home buyers now use the Internet to find a home. All you have to do is make sure your home is on the websites they’re using to search. Realtor.com is the nation’s most utilized Internet real estate search tool by a long shot outpacing competitors by a wide margin. Over 6 million unique visitors come to Realtor.com each month. A listing on Realtor.com virtually assures that your property will be found by the majority of home buyers searching for homes.
The only problem is that Realtor.com isn’t available directly to consumers. Now, however, bloomkey.com offers Realtor.com for ‘for sale by owner‘ sellers for a low, flat fee. Even if you don’t want to pay a buyer agent commission you can still list your home on Realtor.com through bloomkey.com.
Looking for tips and tactics for selling a home by owner? Bloomkey now offers FSBO Tips on Twitter delivered right to your phone or desktop. Get the inside scoop on ways to maximize your real estate investment by selling by owner from the nation’s leading online for sale by ownerassistance company. Advice on how to best prepare and market your home for sale, qualifying potential buyers, negotiating your purchase agreement, and more. You don’t have to ‘go it alone’ anymore as a FSBO seller. Get the information you need to sell your home quickly in the current market without giving up your home’s equity to real estate commissions.
Selling for sale by owner takes a bit of pluck these days. With falling house prices many home sellers feel that they just can’t afford to go without hiring a real estate agent. There’s a certain amount of fear among all of us these days and many just don’t want the added anxiety of not being certain that all that can be done is being done. The corollary of this thought is that only an agent knows ‘all’ that needs to be done to ensure a sale.
But, like many fears, this one can cost you. Consider that in a buyer’s market, the price of the property becomes even more important. Adding a 6% commission on top of your sales price only serves to increase the price of the property. You can still get the marketing exposure you need from ‘by owner mls‘ companies like bloomkey.com. For a monthly fee of just $89.95 you can enjoy listing on the Multiple Listing Service – MLS – and on leading real estate websites like Realtor.com. Not having to pay a listing commission allows you to be more flexible in your pricing thereby making your home more competitve.
As President Kennedy once said, ‘all we have to fear is fear itself’.
For sale by owner in Seattle. That same feeling of not really knowing if he loves you (or your home) til the very end. If you could just reach out somehow and let home buyers know you’re there (without having to pay a listing commission). Now you can have your movie and eat your popcorn too. With flat fee MLS listing, you can get the same great marketing exposure provided by real estate agents, but still save your home’s equity by not paying a listing commission. So now, (without even having to fly to NY and waiting on top of the Empire State Building) you can find a mate for your home by advertising on the world’s largest marketing platform.
How could there be a better ending? 
Selling by owner in Virginia? There’s a wealth of information and tips available online to help you sell your Virginia home by owner.
Now is the perfect time to market your own home. With Spring on the way you can beat the competition by getting to market first with a lower sales price. Not paying a commission puts you at advantage and allows you to price your home more competitively. That’s the key in today’s market and selling by owner has gotten quite a bit easier with the advent of online home selling sites like zillow.com, trulia.com and bloomkey.com among others.
Capitalize on the Internet’s ability to show your home to millions of potential buyers nationwide and find online tools and services to make selling by owner a profitable and successful endeavor.
In case you needed more reasons to sell ‘ for sale by owner ‘ check out these statistics:
According to data from Clear Capital, a real-estate valuation and data provider for banks and investment firms, Las Vegas home prices have fallen 50.7% from their peak and are now where they were in the second quarter of 2002. A report from Moody’s Economy.com, released the first week of February, predicted that the Case-Shiller house price index will fall another 11% from the fourth quarter of 2008. By the end of the real-estate downturn, prices will have fallen by double digits, from peak to trough, in almost 62% of the nation’s 381 metro areas, according to the report. In 10% of the areas, declines will be more than 30%.
With prices at historic lows, paying a real estate commission doesn’t make a lot of sense. Buyers are beginning to warm to the market with the bargains now available. If you’re selling and buying, the difference in price of home you can now afford is relatively greater than ever before. For those brave enough to sell right now, this could be a terrific Spring market for homes priced 5-6% below the competition.
According to the National Association of Realtors’® own research, home sellers may be better off selling on their own than with an agent. In a survey published last year, the median sales price of sellers’ homes who sold ‘for sale by owner‘ was 1% higher than those sold by real estate agents and took 3 weeks less time to sell. Add to that the 5-6% savings enjoyed by FSBO sellers and you’ve got quite an incentive to try it on your own.
It’s unusual that the trade organization for real estate agents would publish data contrary to the interests of its membership, however, NAR’s spin is that for sale by owner sellers are pricing their houses too low and that’s why they’re selling faster and for more money. IMO – another example of the under estimation of the consumer’s intelligence by Realtors®, that’s only serving to hasten the end of traditional real estate brokerage.
There’s never been a better time for ‘for sale by owner‘ real estate models. Companies that cater to the ‘FSBO’ sellers are seeing huge increases in business during the economic downturn. As the economy has devastated major portions of the real estate market and along with them consumer’s equity in their homes, more and more sellers are forced to seek alternatives to paying a traditional commission. On the heals of a decade of historically high loan to value mortgages being issued by now failed mortgage companies, many home owners simply don’t have the equity to pay a traditional real estate commission of 5% or more. And after being battered by job losses and stock market value declines not many people are willing or able to bring cash to the closing table to make up the difference between their property’s sales price and the expenses associated with selling a property.
Companies that assist for sale by owner real estate sellers offer a way out for home sellers by providing needed marketing and sales assistance for a low, manageable fee. In fact, bloomkey.com, for instance, offers a FSBO monthly payment program to help sellers get the marketing exposure they need by placing their properties into the Realtor® Multiple Listing Service and on top websites like Realtor.com® to help home sellers compete in an extremely competitive market. For as little as $85 a month, sellers can now get the exact same marketing exposure for their homes once only available from real estate agents and brokers charging 5-6% of the sales price of a property.
FSBO companies provide economic assistance to home owners at a time when it’s needed more than ever. The proliferation of online, alternative real estate models couldn’t have come at a better time for consumers.
Real estate commissions in the United States are higher than any other industrialized nation. While fees in the U.S. are still averaging over 5%, in the U.K., for instance, they are 2%. That means that home sellers typically pay more for real estate services in the U.S. than other countries. Could it be that real estate is harder to sell in the United States than elsewhere in the world? Hardly – the Realtor® Multiple Listing Service – MLS – is one of the most efficiently run systems anywhere. Acting like the stock exchange, the Realtor® MLS allows all of the Realtor®s in a given geographic region to pool their resources and share access to information about properties for sale, making finding and selling a home tremendously convenient.
So why do many Americans continue to pay such high commissions relative to other countries? According to the independent study by Mark Nadel at the AE Brookings Joint Center, A Critical Assessment of the Standard, Traditional, Residential Real Estate Broker Commission Rate Structure, the real estate commission structure is a poor way to compensate a real estate agent for their time. Not only does it create a poor incentive for the agent to work for the best possible price for their client, there is often a complete disconnect between the time invested by the agent, quality of service and the amount paid by the client.
Discount Realtors and flat rate real estate companies offer alternatives to the traditional commission rate based system. With a discount real estate broker you can get the same bundle of services for less than the prevalent rate in your market. With flat rate, or limited-service brokers you can pick and choose the services you want on an a la carte basis. Either way you can stand to save thousands of dollars in fees, but with flat fee brokers you pay only for the services you use.
