Need Advice On Selling A House Myself ???

Q: I'm selling a house for the first time, and the market is so good for sellers right now that I intend to do it without a real-estate agent. I'd greatly appreciate if anyone could send me or point me towards info about selling your house without an agent. For example: - What to look for in a real-estate attorney. What to expect the attorney to do for me. - How to price the house (I had a professional appraisal recently). - How and where to advertise. - How to prepare the house. Any help would be appreciated.

A: -Is there just a teeny weeny chance that you are a real-estate agent? If so, please explain how the services you described below are worth $21,000. (The 6% commission on my $350,000 house.) Even better, can you work it out in dollars per hour of labor, based on the likely amount of time the agents involved would actually spend selling my house? What would you guess, about 40 hours of work total for buying and selling agent? (Remember, I'm in a town and market where houses sell themselves, often above the asking price.) I'm sure you can understand that I'm slightly unwilling to pay anyone over $500 per hour to do something I can do for myself. And why on earth do you say that "all potential buyers will expect the asking price to reflect 100% of the savings of not having a broker". When a savings is effected in the cost of selling something, the normal market force results in *part* of the savings being passed on to the buyer, and part being kept by the seller. Otherwise places like Walmart would never have been invented. Do you think that they pass along to the consumer 100% of every cost-saving measure they implement in their stores? In this case, from the buyer's point of view, there is no disadvantage to me not employing an agent. I won't pay 3% to an agent bringing me buyers, but the buyer can still hire a "buyer's agent" working entirely for him. That's what some people like to do anyway, even if the seller is using an agency. And the buyer's share of the savings on the real- estate commission will be much larger than the fee to a buyer's agent. -I just sold my townhouse myself, which, I admit, was easier to price because similar units had sold shortly before I put mine on the market. I did not have an attorney, because the buyer had one and there is not much that the seller needs to do. My future sister-in-law works for a real estate attorney and prepared the deed for me for free. All I really had to spend was $100 for the newspaper ad (Boston Globe), $20 for the smoke detector certificate (local fire department), $14 for the sign 'for sale by owner' (Home Depot) and the usual fees at closing. I invested about $5000 during the last couple of month for a new bathroom, hardwood floors in living and dining room and ceramic tiles in the kitchen. We repainted the living room. The first buyer who came in the door at my first open house bought it for a price that I can be proud of. Hence my first and only recommendation: if your house is in better condition than other homes that potential buyers have seen before, you will have no problem selling it. Clean it, paint it, fix it up, make it look loved inside and outside. Remove stains, scratches, odor, etc. In my opinion it makes you more trustworthy if people see that you take good care of things. If you neglected the place for years, people will know immediately and you will have a problem, with or without a broker.

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