Sell Your Home Alone, For Sale By Owner Bootcamp

Welcome, here you can examine the steps and develop a strategy to sell your own home.

As a Real Estate Agent, I understand your decision to go it on your own in selling your home.

Chances are, you have already had your home on the market with a Realtor, and you just didn't have much luck.

This can be for a variety of reasons, you are about to learn just how many things can keep your home from selling.

What's my motivation?

You're probably wondering what my motivation is to help you sell your home alone. Wouldn't I rather just try to convince you to list your home with me instead?

I believe that if you have made the decision to sell your home on your own, that you have your reasons, and you have done some research on what it takes. I believe that by seeking first to help you instead of tell you how wrong you are, that I have a good chance of earning your business, should you decide to use a Realtor later on.

Have you decided that you will just NEVER use a Realtor to sell your home? Ok, that's fine too. Perhaps in the future you will remember how helpful I can be, and you might recommend me to a friend.

With all that out of the way, here is the help that I have to offer:

Step 1 In Selling Your Own Home: Establish a Plan Of Action

Your first steps in selling your own home are going to be a series of preparation steps. The first of these preparation steps is to LEARN THE MARKET.

While on your effort to learn the market, you are going to want to get familiar with AT LEAST the last 6 months of sales in your specific neighborhood, but it is more likely that you will need to get the numbers of sales history for the last entire year.

You will also want to learn the sales history numbers for a couple nearby or similar neighborhoods. These neighborhoods should have homes of similar size and description, with similar attributes such as views, amenities, location, schools, etc.

You should be attending as many open houses in the area on a continuous basis in these areas to get a mental picture of what the competition is like. Remember that every other home on the market in your price range is the competition.

Step 2 Prepare your home

Now that you know the market, hopefully you also have some notes on the sales numbers your area. You'll want to focus on making your home the very best it can be.

It is advisable that you paint the interior and exterior. Think of it this way, if the paint on the exterior is old and shoddy, your potential buyers may never even walk through the front door.

The interior paint is required to make the inside looking fresh. You should also consider replacing any damaged carpet or flooring. Old carpet can be a deal killer. For the paint and carpet you'll want to keep the colors neutral. It's ok to save a few dollars on the type of carpet and paint, but try not to skimp too badly because that will be obvious and that will deter buyers.

De-clutter your home. The less loose objects that your buyers see, the better. Consider consulting with an interior decorator to see if your furniture (and it's arrangement) appeals to the widest range of tastes.

Step 3 Put Together A Marketing Plan

Ask yourself the question, "How are the buyers going to find my home?" If you are going to hold a few open houses, and pick one of the people that comes through to buy your home on your schedule, then you seriously need to adjust your expectations.

Face it, you're going to have to do many (A TON) of open houses. At the same time, realize that only 8% of buyers come from open houses. So advertising is going to be a requirement for you.

You will need a marketing budget, and you should consider doing an aggressive print marketing campaign, as well as an aggressive online marketing campaign.

Ensure that both your print marketing and online marketing are regularly renewed, rerun, and updated. You can't really afford to stop advertising until your home has closed escrow.

Your marketing plan should include a budget for advertising your home in the various publications, with a schedule of how often to renew and rerun the advertising.

Step 4 Start attracting buyers

You now need to hold open houses, and start networking BIG TIME.

To give you an idea, a Real Estate Agent may talk to 20-30 people per day in an effort to locate just one person to buy from a selection hundreds of homes.

Since you want buyers to buy only your home, their choice is limited. Therefore, you may need to network and talk to perhaps 3 times as many people just to statistically reach the number of people who are qualified, capable and motivated to buy your home.

Speaking of being qualified. When you do find an interested buyer for your home, you will need to make sure that they are pre-approved for a loan that will get you the purchase price for your home.

If the buyers are not pre-qualified, then you have the tricky step of sending them to a lender to get pre-qualified. You may be forced to discuss some of their financial parameters, which they may resent because they are about to negotiate with you.