| FSBOs (for sale by owner) are NFE (not for everyone) |
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Burbidge says you should set a mood with sights and smells to make the house feel homey. That doesn't mean you should go overboard on scented candles, but use your imagination to present the house in a good light.
"You'll categorize your house by the way it looks: a fix-upper, a regular house or one that's been well taken care of," Burbidge says. Present it accordingly.
But, above all, he says, the house has to be clean when you show it.
Market the house effectively
"You're not looking for thousands of calls," Burbidge says. "You're looking for one call -- from the buyer."
That means you should be specific about what you're selling. If you're selling a three-bedroom house for $180,000 near a nice school, you're not interested in getting calls from retirees looking for two-bedroom homes for $90,000, nor do you want to field calls from Ferrari-driving mansion-hunters.
So specify your asking price everywhere you advertise -- on handbills, newspaper ads, the Internet and maybe the yard sign. Specify number of bedrooms and bathrooms, size of garage, number of stories and the approximate square footage. "Cozy" means different things to different people, but "800 square feet" means exactly what it says.
A drawback to selling your house yourself is that you risk drawing from a smaller pool of potential buyers. You can advertise the house on the Web, but most house-hunters using real-estate agents narrow down their choices through the Multiple Listing Service -- and you get listed with that huge computer database through the services of a Realtor.
Buy Owner is one of many businesses that let house-sellers advertise on the Web in a format that allows buyers to search for the kind of house they want in the area they want. The company has an agreement with a real-estate brokerage that allows sellers, if they wish, to get their homes listed on the Multiple Listing Service, president Scott Eckert says.
"We call it the best of both worlds, where your property can be online with Buy Owner and at the same time be in the Multiple Listing Service," Eckert says. The company also provides yard signs and advertises on TV, radio and billboards and in newspapers, but Web listings are the backbone of the service.
Owners.com, too, offers sellers the chance to advertise their houses on the Web. The site also offers thousands of words of advice about buying and selling a house, including ad-writing tips, pricing information, marketing and negotiating strategies, finding attorneys and title agents, and recommendations for how-to books.
Koch, the CEO of Owners.com, says that many visitors to the site are using a real-estate broker, but go to the site "to understand the sequence and the process."
"If you understand the process, you can make better decisions, even if you have an agent," he adds. "We would be incomplete if we didn't also help those who had relationships with Realtors."
It would be a mistake to rely solely on the Internet. Signs, handbills, word of mouth and newspaper ads all can help bring a buyer to the house. Burbidge recommends reading advertisements written by professionals to get an idea of which words and phrases to use. |
