All that it means is that you’re going to sell your house without the use of a real estate agent or agents to help you facilitate that transaction. Can you sell your house for sale by owner? Absolutely. You own the house. You can do what you want with it.
Why would you choose to do that? There’s several different reasons, but some people, most people, choose it because either they don’t want to pay the agent. If you sell using an agent, there’s usually a listing agent and then there’s going to be a buyer’s agent. And both those people get paid for helping with the transaction. A lot of people don’t want to pay that, they may choose to go for sale by owner. Sometimes it can be faster and easier if you can without cleaning, fixing, listing, just get the property sold. Sometimes people just don’t like the traditional sales process of having an agent, showing the home, et cetera. They’d like to skip some of that and they want to find another way to just sell the property.
Keep in mind that if you’re going to list it and market it by yourself, then you’re going to be doing a lot of the work that your traditional agent or listing agent would be doing for the home. So you can list your house lots of places. You can schedule the showings. You can do all of that stuff. But if you’re trying to avoid that, selling it for sale by owner, then you might want to contact a buyer on your own. When we buy, as investors we buy direct from the owners. They are selling it for sale by owner, but instead of advertising, walking people through, they contact us. We go over, we discuss the price. If we all agree, then we just purchase the home directly from them. We skip a lot of the other steps that are involved in a traditional sale.
Now, one word of caution that I would say if you’re thinking about selling your home for sale by owner. Where I have seen people struggle is either the person selling the home, or the person buying the home, probably needs to have some experience in real estate and real estate purchases, sales. Because if neither party knows how to work through the process, you can really find yourself struggling with things like which contracts do you need. Once you’ve signed the contract, where do you need to take the contract? Who else do you need to involve in the transaction? Things like a title company, an appraisal, an inspection. Think all these things that you may need to get. If neither party is familiar with the process, I’ve definitely seen people struggle.
We buy a lot direct from sellers. A lot of our sellers are not terribly familiar with selling a home, but we are very familiar with selling a home so we can help guide them through the steps. Or if you’re looking to sell your home and you’ve sold multiple homes, you can sell yours for sale by owner. Your buyer then may not have a lot of experience, but then you can walk them through the process.
So if you’re curious about for sale by owner, it’s just selling a property that you own without the use of an agent. There’s different ways you can go about it. You can list and advertise and show the home on your own, or you can contact somebody that’s a direct buyer who will come in, make you an offer for the property, and help you work through that transaction the way that they’ve done several times. I hope this helps clear it up and a couple things to be cautious of if you’re looking to do it on your own. If we can help you, you can find us at the website, sellmysanantoniohouse.com or just give us a call (210) 201-6644. Thank you.