Why You Should Not Go FSBO

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Are you thinking about selling your home without an agent? Many first time home sellers decide to go this route because they haven’t yet experienced the value of having a real estate agent working for you. In many cases, FSBO homes sales are unsuccessful. If you want to increase the chances of selling your home, your best bet is to hire a reputable agent who has specializes in your local market. Continue reading and discover a few reasons why you should think twice about going FSBO.

Time

It generally takes a considerable amount of time to sell a home. If you decide to go FSBO, be ready to spend a lot of time taking pictures, staging, marketing, and showing the home. On top of all this, you will need to spend a lot of time answering emails and responding to phone calls from buyer agents.

Costs

If you decide to sell your home on your own, you will need to understand that there is a good chance that you do not save any money at all. This is because you are spending a ton of money on upfront costs. Also, there is no real guarantee of these investments proving to be worth it.

You absorb the liability

There are many steps when it comes to selling to a home. If you are inexperienced when it comes to real estate selling, you are prone to making mistakes. For example, incorrectly listing features of the home. When you do not have a licensed real estate agent working for you, you will have to pay for all those mistakes.

HUD Foreclosures

HUD foreclosures and VA Foreclosures are some of the best homes to buy when price is part of the equation. As with most Americans, price is always a concern. If not buying the same house for less, why not buy more house for the same dollar invested? When looking for a good deal it is hard to do better than the VA or HUD foreclosures market. The simple truth is that there are just more VA and HUD homes on the market, as they represent such a large number of mortgages that are generated each year. This translates into more foreclosures just by the magnitude of difference between all others comparing to the two largest.

The two largest also being government owned and operated means that they have less time to wait to make money back on the home. The FHA is especially known for selling HUD homes for less than the average sales price in a given area. FHA foreclosures represent a fraction of HUD but they are still a significant number of homes and both should be considered.

VA (Veterans Administration) and HUD (Housing and Urban Development) have different and unique opportunities for the buyer. Both are often forgiven for the local taxes normally associated with the purchase of a home (this is on a county by county basis). Be sure to ask the local title company or escrow company to look into it for you before closing as this is often missed due to their are not used to dealing with the 2 to 3 percent of the market that VA and HUD foreclosures represent.

Foreclosure Listings Increasing

As the market settled after the mortgage meltdown foreclosure listings also settled and fewer homes were on the market with a placard reading “Bank Foreclosure” in big red lettering. This was a good thing for the entire real estate market. Having an abundance of foreclosures brings the entire market down and it makes it harder for home owners, who would like to move, to get the appropriate price for their home as a similar home down the same street was sold for substantially less and the appraiser is using the foreclosure as a comparable sale.

This is just one of the problems when there are too many foreclosure listings in any area. Another issue is the television set that sits in everyone’s living room harping about the price of homes based on the number of foreclosures and this constant barrage of negative information makes most people sit on the sidelines waiting for the market to either implode completely or to correct itself. Meanwhile while they wait, others are buying foreclosure listings and making great investments.

Whatever the reason, a market can only handle so many foreclosure listings at any given time. The more foreclosures, the lower the market gets and this is a lesson the banks that were foreclosing and selling off realized too late. The market and their investments would have been better off if there had not been a rush to divest themselves of the toxic assets made more toxic by their own actions.