Jan 08
14
FSBO: Showing the House
Now your house is on the market and you start getting phone calls about it. People have driven by. They’ve taken fliers. Now they want to come and see the inside.
There are a couple of ways you can handle people coming to see your house. If you had a realtor representing you, you’d be pressured into showing your house at a moment’s notice. Likewise, as people call, you can show your house whenever someone wants to come and see it. The advantage to this is that you won’t eliminate any potential buyer because your house wasn’t available to see when they had time to see it. Even with this advantage, I believe this is the worst thing you can do.
I firmly believe in the Open House method of showing your house. I actually don’t know whether this method is really called that within real estate circles or whether it even has a name but it’s what I call it. What I call the Open House method is simply to have as many open houses as you can and only show the house at those times. When talking to a woman flipping the house next door to mine, she claimed, “Open houses don’t work in this market. I’ve tried them.” Nevertheless, my house sold within a week and a half while hers was still on the market 3 months later. I’m not saying that it was the reason our house sold and hers didn’t but it certainly did work in our case.
The Open House method has some real strong advantages.
Showing your house at an Open House allows you to get your home picture perfect. You can spend a couple of hours before your open house making sure everything is spotlessly clean. You can make sure everything is in its place. You can make sure there is no unwashed laundry visible. You can make sure all the kids’ toys are organized and put away. We always cooked some refrigerator cookies right before the open house to not only give the people walking through a treat to remember us by, but to also bring some good smells that create a home-like feel.
It’s critical to make sure your house has no bad odors. If that means leaving the dog at the neighbors for the days that you’re selling your house (or the kids for that matter…just kidding), do it. If a house has an unusual smell that’s the quickest way to turn off potential buyers.
You can also make sure extra people aren’t at the house. You can send the kids off with one of the parents to go drive around or to visit friends for the duration. You don’t want kids running around distracting potential buyers. This is a business transaction so it should feel like one. Also, it’s an emotional decision and anything that could bring distraction or annoyance should be avoided. When we would hold open houses, my wife usually manned the house while I took the kids somewhere to watch a movie while sitting in the van.
While showing the house to people you should fight the temptation to follow them around. Let them walk around on their own and be available for questions. You don’t want people to feel the pressure of having you standing there listening to their comments. I believe you should keep it as low pressure as possible and let the people fall in love with your house on their own. Anything to make the potential buyers uncomfortable should be avoided. When agents show houses, they recommend the home owners not to be there which is smart. When selling the house on your own, you don’t have that luxury but you can make it as comfortable for the people as possible by behaving like an agent and not like the homeowner.
Another thing that’s really important is to have copies of important documents available for the potential buyers. If you’ve had a home inspection, leave copies for people to take. Have extra fliers as well as purchase agreements that a buyer could fill out. Technically it’s the buyers responsibility to produce the purchase agreement for you but if you have a generic, fill-in-the-blank form for them, it’ll take the scare out of performing this transaction without a professional holding their hand through the process. I’ll include a link to a generic purchase agreement that I’ve used. I am not a lawyer but I’ve used this 2 different times and it’s worked well for us.
Now here’s the kicker. This is where you truly earn that commission you would otherwise give to the agents. You need to hold these open houses as often as you possibly can. If you’re not going to make the house generally available to people on their time frame, you need to make the open houses as convenient as possible for people to get to. We usually held them every day except Sundays. We tried to hold them during the middle of the afternoon on Saturdays and in the evenings on weekdays. We also posted the open house days and times in all of our advertising (newspaper and online) so that people know when they can come see the house and can plan for it. While this is the hardest part because of the time and effort involved, this is also the biggest advantage of not having a real estate agent. There is no agent out there (unless you have a million dollar house) that would agree to holding an open house every day of the week. Agents have other clients that they need to take care of and they probably don’t see it as a valuable use of their time. They’d rather let the buyer’s agents do all the showing for them and then just collect their half of the commission. You have no other clients and priorities higher than getting your house sold. In spite of what an agent will tell you, nobody has your best interests at heart as much as you.
This is really hard work. It’s really hard to clean the house to immaculate condition every single day for the open houses but in the end, the payoff is worth it.
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