I’ve been at this now for a little more than two weeks, which is a short time actually, but when I started, I was hoping it would be over in a week. Now it’s day 15 of this “hybrid FSBO” scenario and I’m doing my third weekend of open houses. I’m spending lots of time second guessing all my choices in life at the moment, which is so pointless. I think, “I should have just hired an agent,”, then “I can do this.” I do lots of agonizing about whether I should drop the price, whether the agents are conspiring against me, whether I should just give up and wait until next year. Man, it’s hard to steer the course! And agents make seductive offers to sell my house for a nice fat price and make it easy on me. This is way harder than I thought it would be!
Hang in there. The listing agents won’t do anything for you except put your house on the MLS, and then take 3% of your hard earned sale money. Follow all of the advice in my book that applies. You’re doing it right, it just takes time. It’s a common ploy by agents to say they can somehow sell the house for much more than you are selling it for. Bull. How would a higher price make it sell faster? They don’t do any marketing, very few if any open houses. And agents won’t conspire against you. Some may not be happy about your approach, but they will not turn down a payday over that (assuming you are offering some commission to a buyer’s agent – if not, you should, 2% is pretty fair).
Thanks Bill! Your book was a big help to me in getting this off the ground. I am just having trouble getting any offers at the moment. My agency (a flat-fee service called http://homebay.com) tells me that the biggest influence is staging and price. It’s hard to blog about this because what if buyer agents read it, LOL. 🙂 But I agree mostly with this sentiment… thanks for the encouragement!