American home sales are brokered by professional real estate agents. Numbers don’t lie—most people prefer to use an agent. With such a vast majority, it’s worth looking into why so many sellers choose not to go the FSBO route. To that end, let’s review some of the cons of FSBO to understand further why so many people prefer professional support when selling their homes. Selling the property as FSBO takes longer than an agent sale and requires extensive time and effort from the owner! Selling a home on your own is no easy task. On the contrary, it requires specialized knowledge, hard work, time, skill, and dedication to make it happen. Simply cleaning and preparing the house for a showing can be a challenge in and of itself without professional help and counseling. A home that has not been adequately cleaned and prepared for sale will give the buyer the impression that the owner has been slacking off on essential home maintenance. They will be reluctant to pay as high a price as they might have if they had seen the house looking its best. Too little cleaning or clumsy staging could result in a substantially lower price when you finally make the sale. The owner must also consider that real estate agents present and sell homes as a full-time job and, therefore, must be prepared to devote a considerable amount of time to explaining and marketing the house they aim to sell if they desire to do so without professional help and support. Finding the hours and energy to handle a real estate agent’s job and whatever other obligations you might have can be a serious challenge, especially for the unprepared. Moreover, the owner of an FSBO house might find themselves stuck with those extra duties for a lot longer than they expect: it is a well-documented fact that houses take considerably longer
6
Powered by FlippingBook