How To Sell A House Without A Realtor: A step-by-step guide

You are at that point that you either need or want to sell your home, and you are wondering whether you should hire a realtor. The answer is “it depends” on your situation. If you want to sell your house fast, or you want to potentially save a lot of money and are a do-it-yourselfer, then it is definitely worth looking into selling your house without a realtor. There are 5 basic steps in the process:

Establish your selling price,
Advertise your home,
Show your home to prospective buyers,
Complete the necessary paperwork and
Finalize the sale.

Step 1 - Figure out your asking price

In the real estate agent world, they call this step “looking at the comps”, short for comparables. The idea behind comparables is checking to see what similar houses sold for in your neghborhood recently.This is usually the hardest step for people who have never sold a house before, as they don’t have the tools at hand to easily research this information.

There are lots of resources online which aim to help you; these include websites like Zillow and Redfin. You can go to these sites, enter your home address and you will be greeted with an abundance of information including what they think your house is worth (Zillow calls it a Zestimate). You should ignore their estimates for one simple reason; neither of these companies have ever set foot inside your home, so there is no way they could accurately estimate how much your home is worth.

Instead, look at each house on your street and neighboring streets on these websites and:

write down what each home sold for,
note the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, the size of the home, the size of the lot.
look at all the pictures, and see what the condition of the house was like and when it was last updated. Look for any special features about the home like whether it was on a lake and so on.

After you have written down all this information, you then compare your house and get a rough idea of how much your home could sell for.

Sound like a lot of work? That’s because it is…………….finding comparables is a tedious, time-consuming process. However, if you have the time and patience to do it, you can save tens of thousands of dollars in commisions when you sell your home without a realtor.

If you want to skip the work, your fast-track way to figure out the value of your home is to contact a cash buyer like House Solutions USA. We buy houses full-time, and will give you a free evaluation of how much your home is worth in its as is condition.

Step 2 - Advertise your home without a realtor

Now that you have an idea of the selling price of your house, the next step is to advertise it. You can do this either online, offline or both.

Selling your house without a realtor | Online advertising

Start with taking some photos of every room of your home, as well as some pictures of the outside as well from different angles. There are a number of different sites you can advertise your home online such as Zillow, Craigslist and forsalebyowner.com. You can advertise on all of these sites simultaneously by filling out their online forms and uploading your photos.

A word of caution: as soon as you post your home for sale online, you will be bombarded by calls and emails from realtors. They will either want to get you to hire them, or they may say they have a buyer for your house. Either way, you should ignore these calls in the beginning since you will end up paying their real estate commissions, which is what you were trying to avoid in the first place.

Once actual buyers start calling, be prepared to answer their questions and show them your home.

Selling a house without a realtor | Offline advertising

There are two main ways to advertise your house online: newspapers and yard signage. You can call your local newspapers and ask for the classifieds section. They will advise how you how to place an advertisement for your home and the related costs; you should also ask about the best days to place an ad as well.

You also have the option of placing a For Sale Sign in your yard. You can get these in pretty much any home improvement store like Home Depot or Lowes, or you can order a sign online as well. Once you choose a sign. it is strongly recommended that, in addition to including your phone number, you also write By Appointment Only or something similar. This will help prevent strangers from knocking on your door at all hours of the day, which can become a huge nuisance.

Step 3 - Showing your home

You’ve now advertised your home and are ready to show it to potential buyers. One of the most important things you need to keep in mind is that a lot of buyers have poor vision of what your house will look like as their future home. You want to eliminate as much distractions as possible by staging your home. Before you show your home, you consider doing the following at a minimum:

Cleanup the front of your house thoroughly. You only get one time to make a first impression.
Eliminate all clutter inside. You want the buyers to thing about the space, not your standard of hygiene.
Put away personal items like photos. Again, you don’t want potential buyers focusing on your family and pets, but rather how well the layout of your home will suit them.
Conduct repairs and repaint the home inside and out if you can afford it. Many buyers will turn away from your home if they see they will have a bunch of repairs to do as soon as they move in.

Step 4 - The paperwork

At this stage, you have a buyer for your home and it is time to prepare the paperwork needed to sell your home and have it signed. There is a lot of paperwork involved; the first document is the sales contract.

Choose a contract

Both you and the buyer will have to sign a contract covering the sale. You can contact a real estate attorney to prepare a contract for you, or you can use a standard contract for the sale of real property typically used by realtors in your state. In Florida, the most common contract used is the “AS IS” Residential Contract for Sale and Purchase contract, also know as the FARBAR contract. The FARBAR contract is highly recommended as it is designed to protect both the buyer and the seller and has already been reviewed by real estate attorneys in the state of Florida.

You can also prepare your own contract to sell your home yourself but you do so at your own risk and considering the amount of money involved in the sale of your home, the risk may not be worth it.

Pick a Title company

Once you have the signed contract in hand, you can then proceed on the next step of selling your house without a realtor: title searches, lien searches and closing documentation. In Florida, this documentation is almost always prepared and processed by a Title company. There are many title companies to choose from, and as always, you should do some due diligence to determine which Title company is best for you.

Once you hire a Title company, they will take your contract and start a number of searches on your property. They will also contact the Buyer and request some information as well. Good Title companies will help guide you through the process of selling a home without a realtor from here on.

Instead of using a Title company, you also have the option of hiring a real estate attorney but this option almost always costs you more; attorneys are also not as efficient as Title companies, and as such it will take longer for you to sell your home.

It should be noted that we have just skimmed the surface on what documentation is involved in selling your house yourself. There is a ton of additional paperwork that needs to be completed depending on the location and circumstances of your property. The FARBAR contract alone is over 10 pages long and can be scary to use if you are not familiar with contracts.

If the paperwork process sounds daunting to you, you can also contact House Solutions USA. When we buy a house, we pay for the preparation of all the paperwork for you, so you don’t have to worry about dealing with any of it.

Step 5 - The Closing

You have reached the home stretch. The Title company has prepared the deed as well as all the other legal paperwork required for the sale of your property. The Title company will then set an appointment for both you and the buyer to come in and sign the documentation. The buyer would have been given instructions to wire in all the money for the purchase of your property in advance of the meeting. All the legal documentation including the deed has been prepared, the property search has been completed and a title insurance policy is lined up.

If everything goes well, all that remains is for you and the buyer to sign the closing paperwork; the buyer gets the deed to the property and the seller gets his funds from the sale of the house.

Selling your house without a Realtor | Pros and Cons

Selling a home yourself can go really smoothly or can be riddled be problems and headaches. Here are the pros and cons of selling your house without a Realtor.

Pros

You can save tens of thousands of dollars.
You deal with the buyers directly.
You have more control over showing potential buyers your house.

Cons

You may feel lost at times navigating complex paperwork.
It is a very time consuming process.
Things can go wrong quickly, espcially if the buyer is getting a mortgage loan

How to sell a home and avoid the BIGGEST problem

Selling a home without an agent is a lot of work, but can be both financially and emotionally rewarding. However, even after you do everything right in

setting the price for your house,
fixing up the house,
showing the home to several buyers and
getting the paperwork ready,

You still can run into one big problem. If your buyer is getting a mortgage as part of the terms of your contract and they end up not getting a loan, you have just wasted all that time and effort. You have to start the home-selling process all over again.

The good news is that there is an alternative to avoid this issue. You can sell your home to a cash buyer like House Solutions USA. Our home buying process includes using cash to buy your house, so you don’t waste time with buyers who don’t get their mortgage approved.

There are other advantages to working with us as well:

You don’t have to clean or do any repairs; we are going to do all the repairs after you have already sold the home.
You don’t have to worry about doing the right paperwork. We buy houses full-time and will take care of all of that for you.
You don’t have to show your home to a bunch of strangers day-in, day-out. Say goodbye “Open Houses”!
You can sell your house without a realtor and you pay no fees or commissions.

So before you do all the work described in this article, start your home-selling journey with House Solutions USA and let us show you how to sell a house without a realtor.

Fill out our cash offer form and we will contact you promptly. It is free, there is no obligation and you can save yourself money and stress at the same time.

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