We hear that often when a seller calls.  They have usually seen this website, a sign, or received a postcard in the mail, so they call to find out more about how they can sell their Lee’s Summit home.

(note we buy in other areas, but this example happens to deal with Lee’s Summit)

Options for selling your house:

1.  For Sale by Owner:

You could run to the store and buy one of those “For Sale By Owner Signs”, write your phone number on it, and stick it in the yard.  This is an awesome option if your house is on a busy street that will get traffic, is in great condition, and is staged properly.  If you are in a highly desirable area, the street traffic will draw buyers.

But selling FSBO as it is more commonly known has some pitfalls, quite a few in fact.

First, can you go through your own home with an impartial eye and decide what must be fixed, updated, or taken out in the case of staging?  Then comes the task of making sure your house is priced correctly.  Realtors have access to multiple listing service and can help you decide the best price, kind of hard to do for the average homeowner.

After you get it all pretty, priced right, and the sign in the yard, you have to deal with callers and showings.  Do you have time to take calls from potential home buyers, do you know how to pre-qualify them over the phone so you are not just letting in any average Joe into your house, or worse yet a thief casing the place?  Again a Realtor usually talks with a buyer and their lender to confirm that they are actually qualified buyers, as they get paid by commission, most don’t want to waste their time carting people around to houses when they are not real buyers.

Then after you go through numerous phone calls and showings, and get a buyer who does want to buy, do you know how to write that contract?  Sure you can go to the office supply store and buy a real estate contract, but do you know what is important to include to protect you in case the buyer can’t get a loan, has inspection issues, or any one of many other issues that could come up?

So while FSBO with your Lee’s Summit house is going to save you a bit in commission, do you have the knowledge to get it all put together and do you have the time to spend getting it all together and selling your house?

2.  Realtor:

Next, most people turn to a Realtor to list and sell their house, which is an awesome option. The realtor has the signs and all the online marketing tools to get the most people to see your house online and the largest number of qualified buyers through your house.  A Realtor also has access to vital data to make sure your home is priced correctly.  Plus they can walk through and usually help you determine what to repair, update, and remove.  They have the ability to handle phone calls and showings, so you don’t have to.  And they can help negotiate a contract that considers the many contingencies.

But there are some Realtor drawbacks.  Keeping your home show ready so that it can be shown on a moment’s notice.  Can you pay a Realtor 6 or 7 % to complete the transaction for you? If the answers to all of these questions are yes, then you need to call up our sister company Realty Resource and talk to them about listing your house for sale.  But if they are not, then you might want to consider this last option.

3.  Investor:

Selling to a Home Buyer like us.  We don’t waste your time.  You submit your property to us today, we have a conversation, we look at the house, we strike an agreement and you could be at the closing table in a few days.

We don’t care what the house looks like or the repairs it needs.  The more repairs it needs, sometimes the better because then we can fix it up the way today’s buyers want, then when we go to resell it, it is the perfect house.  We handle all the paperwork, we don’t charge a 6% or 7% commission, and we pay all cash.  So you don’t have to worry about waiting 30 to 45 days to find out our lender said no.

We work through a  title company that has extensive experience in all types of transactions.  So if you have some title issues, or ownership issues, or other paperwork issues with your house, between the title company and us, we can help you figure them out.  And we have closed sales with sellers in China and buyers in Peru, so if you don’t live here, we can still accommodate you.

So before you go the FSBO route or the Realtor route, you might consider submitting your property to us to see if we can pay what you are asking.  It may be that we can, and it does not cost you anything to find out other than the time to submit the property and have a conversation or two.