Are you a home owner trying to sell your house? Do you feel that you have the skills and demeanor to work as an entrepreneur? Do you enjoy talking and networking with people? Are you the type of person who completes a task once it has begun? If you have answered yes to these questions, you probably have what it takes to bridge your interests and skills in the effort to sell your home as a For Sale By Owner or what is oftentimes termed FSBO.
If you are seriously considering the selling of your home or property, then you basically have three options. One, you can open your phone book and call a licensed Realtor. Two, you can stick a for sale sign in your front lawn and hope whoever drives by will stop. Or Three, you can search on the internet for a licensed Real Estate company which focuses on giving you the entrepreneurial aspect of selling your home, as well as the main benefit of employing a licensed Realtor.
Choice number one is the traditional choice of having a Full Service Realtor list your home. This option may give you great results, but it is quite expensive as a Real Estate Broker will elicit a 6-7% commission off the top of what your home sells for. Example: if you sell your home for $300,000 then the Realtor commission is $18,000. Of course, they usually split that if another Realtor brings you a buyer for your home.
Choice number two is sort of the old school idea of desiring to keep that money for yourself. In this regard, you buy a For Sale By Owner sign and stick it in your yard. If you’re web savvy, you place a few ads on your advertising site of choice (which could be free or cost you a few hundred dollars). You may also place an ad within your local newspaper. This choice has many avenues, depending upon your experiential knowledge, but ultimately will not provide you with much of a blip within the home-selling radar.
Choice number three is selling your home as a Flat Fee MLS listing. In this, you act as a FSBO but you also contact a licensed Realtor that specializes in placing your home within your local Multiple Listing Service (MLS). These companies are usually very inexpensive (in terms of Real Estate), charging anywhere between $300 to $800, depending upon the specialty options you select. These types of Flat Fee companies give you the marketing power of the MLS, but allow your entrepreneurial spirit to tackle the Real Estate endeavors they would normally handle as a traditional, full service Realtor.
This option, within the past ten years has grown considerably, given the development of home internet use. However, selling Flat Fee is an entrepreneurial enterprise and is not for everyone. Yes, it can save you thousands of dollars, as option one referenced, but you really need some basic skills that go beyond the do-it-yourself imaginative idea that oftentimes ends up going nowhere.
A basic skill-set outline of an entrepreneur is leadership, confidence, creativity, organization, and competitiveness. These are qualities that many people have, but sometimes don’t consider applying them within a Real Estate situation. Traditionally, when people plan to purchase or sell a home, they most often look toward a Realtor within their personal network of friends or associates. Sometimes they will simply call a local Realtor. However, in today’s internet explosion, when people are looking for someone to sell their home, they are beginning to look in the mirror. Why? They see themselves as having the aptitude of learning what needs to be done and having the skills to get the job done.
How do they do this? They contact an online Flat Fee MLS company, and usually within a few days time, their home is not only added to the Realtor-only MLS, but also to hundreds of other publicly-accessed Real Estate websites that showcase homes, such as Realtor.com.
The difference between the MLS and other websites who showcase homes is that only a licensed Realtor can access the MLS. In addition to that complexity, the publicly-viewed Realty websites are really types of MLS spin-offs that show homes which appear first within the MLS. This is why there is a growing urge to list as a Flat Fee entrepreneur as opposed to FSBO, because a single home owner can only make use of public advertising and not the MLS. Bottom-line? A single home owner cannot realistically syndicate their home to hundreds of Real Estate websites and therefore they miss out on the marketing power of the MLS.
However, if they select to go for it as a Flat Fee entrepreneur, then their home is added to the MLS, and after speaking with their local Broker who was referred from the online company, the home owner receives all the necessary paperwork to take their home through the process, and the entreprenueal marketing begins.
At this stage, the home owner, in all respects, is performing as if he or she was the Realtor. They take the phone calls, they make the home-showing appointments, they negotiate with potential buyers, and they close the sale at the Title company. That is the work involved, and anyone who is after saving money, has a drive toward accomplishing tasks, and enjoys the inner feeling of entreprenueal satisfaction can reap large rewards buy making use of the ever-growing Flat Fee MLS Real Estate market.
Source by Jamie V