Aug 07
28
FSBO: Marketing
The biggest disadvantage that people that sell their own houses face compared to Realtors is marketing. A realtor has access to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) which is accessed by all other Realtors. They put some of the MLS information on realtor.com and your state’s local MLS, but in order to get all the information you have to work through a realtor. This is really a realtor’s only advantage. They horde information in order to sell it to you for 6% of your sale price.
But we’re in luck. The MLS isn’t the only way to market a house and is even becoming more and more inconsequential with other options becoming available.
Newspaper classifieds have been the prime way of advertising your home when selling it on your own for decades. In fact, it’s been the only game in town for a long time. Because of this, classifieds listings are also very expensive. If you live in a smaller market with a smaller paper, it might not be so bad, but if you live in a large city, you’re liable to pay hundreds of dollars per week for your listing. With this kind of price tag, you may consider the realtor listing fee may not be so bad.
Luckily there are other resources. All over the country free online classifieds are popping up and becoming very popular. The biggest around, especially on the west coast, is craigslist.com. Craigslist was started in the San Francisco bay area as a mailing list of events going on in the city. It then developed into a website that allowed anyone to post whatever event or classified free of charge. It pays for itself by charging for job postings only in a couple of large markets (ie San Francisco). The rest of it is free for any one’s use. I always post whatever I have to sale on craigslist. I’ve ended up selling more than just my house through their services.
Craigslist isn’t the only online classifieds site out there. Many cities have their own versions that are geared for a particular area. For example, in Utah there’s a free classifieds service through the local NBC network affiliate’s website, ksl.com.
These sites are becoming the dominant player in advertising even to the point of taking significant revenues from newspapers all over the country. More and more people are going to these sites to find what they want to buy before even picking up the newspaper classifieds. The more popular these sites become, the less we need to pay for advertising in other ways.
When advertising your house, you need to place it in as many places as possible and get as much exposure as possible. I chose to place it on the online sites as well as in the newspaper. Even with the popularity of these sites increasing, there still is a significant portion of the market that still looks exclusively in the paper for FSBO listings. When selling my homes, we would take an informal survey as to where people found out about the house. We found that people found us about half the time via the free websites like craigslist and about half the time via the newspaper. Here’s what’s really interesting. The ones that found us via the newspaper actually didn’t see our ad in the newspaper itself but on the newspaper’s own online presence. The moral? If your newspaper has the option, it may be advantageous to only advertise online instead of in the printed papers. People have found that it’s a lot easier to search for the kind of house they’re looking for online than going ad by ad in the classifieds section of the paper.
The other standard way of marketing your house is with signs. I’ve only used the standard red For Sale By Owner signs that you can pick up at Lowes or Home Depot or any other home improvement store. I would usually have a large sign in the front yard with an “info tube”. The “info tube” is a plastic container to put flyers for your house. This is extremely important. Your house flyer is the easiest place to outline all the advantages of your house. Most people, when house hunting will do a drive-by first and look at the outside. Then they’ll grab a flyer to get the details. And only after they have that information will they come in and see it. Make sure your flyer is organized and easy to see the good points. I’ll link an example of a flyer that I’ve used.
Other signs you can use at your discretion. I’ll generally put smaller signs at the entrance of the neighborhood to direct people from the main road or make it easier for people to find the house that are looking for it.
You’ll never know which marketing device will bring in the buyer for your house so use all you can. One house I ended up selling to a neighbor who had been renting and wanted to buy in the neighborhood. Another came via the newspaper website. Another came just because he happened to see the For Sale sign while looking at another house. No one method is the magic bullet, but a combination of all of them will bring in a lot of people.
Link:
Here is a sample house flyer I’ve used in the sale of one of my homes (3 MB)