DIY Fridays: Sell Your Home By Yourself
In this DIY Friday, we will talk about one of the most lucrative DIY activities you can ever do in your life. Some DIY tasks will help you save a few pennies while selling your home by yourself and shortcutting the Real Estate agent will save you thousands of dollars. In most cases, you can save over $10,000. I personally saved $16,245. Here’s my story:
First House, First Agent, First Mistake
I bought my first house at the age of 24. It was definitely too small for our growing family (we already had my son, William and my wife got pregnant not so long after we moved). This is why we decided to sell our house only 6 months after buying it. This was, in and of itself, a big mistake. My wife and I were pretty young at that time and we thought that we needed the help of a professional. We were looking for someone who would guide us and help us get the best offer we could. We turned to a well known Real Estate agent. We sold our first house with an agent and it was a big mistake.
- An average selling price (we didn’t sell over the market).
- No extra negotiation skills (he was at the end of his 6 months mandate and rushed us to accept the offer as is *to make his commission*).
- Confusion with the buyers as for the moving date (since we had to go through our agent and the buyer’s agent to negotiate dates, I guess that one agent didn’t forward proper information).
- Wrong paperwork (there were mistakes made by the agent while providing paperwork).
I don’t know about you, but $10,580 sounds a little bit expensive for this kind of “professional expertise”. But it’s okay as we were scared and selling a house sounded highly complicated. We thought that we could make a big mistake while trying to save a few thousand.
Second House, No Agent, More Money in My Pocket!
We sold our second house roughly 4 years after we bought it. We wanted to move to another city in order to have more land (I’m a big fan of nature). Frustrated from our first experience, we decided to sell our house ourselves. We used the service from By The Owner (Canada) – I don’t get any compensation for plugging the link by the way, this is truly what we did and I really enjoyed my experience. This was great as we didn’t have to bother taking the right pictures or attracting visitors as By The Owner gets a lot of traffic. My house was actually seen by over 200 new visitors a day. In 10 days, we had 3 visits and the house sold for the average market price. This was a great experience and we saved $16,245 based on a 5% commission rate minus fees incurred by selling the property (which was roughly $2,500 including home staging). While selling your house by yourself is a great experience and you can easily save $10,000 in the process, there are a few pointers you need to consider before jumping into this adventure.
Here’s How We Saved Over $16,000
Step #1: Assess Your Property
Page 1 of 3 | Next page
Related posts:
