How 8 dollars sold our house in a single weekend

Have you ever been in a position where you HAD to sell a house and you had to sell a house FAST? There are many reasons why this can happen, but most of the time it is because we lost our job. Without income it is difficult to make all those payments, right? When it happened to us, we quickly listed our house with a real estate agent for a 60-day listing. I never sign long-list deals. If they don’t get the job done quickly, they’re not worth what they want you to pay.

Not only did we not get a buyer, we also did not get any viewers. Then we tried another agency…and another…and another until we gave up on real estate agents. We thought we didn’t have much to lose. We knew we had a nice house, well set in a nice neighborhood, but we weren’t getting any viewers. Realtors just didn’t show our house to prospective buyers.

We also didn’t see much publicity for our house. It seems to be the norm that real estate agents advertise less than before. I can sympathize with their needs because they don’t get paid unless the house is sold. But many of us have a pressing need to sell as quickly as possible. It’s important to get the word out to as many people…potential buyers…as possible.

But companies and real estate agents don’t advertise much these days. In rural areas near where we live there are now about 100 houses for sale, about 40 more than the average before the current real estate slowdown. You might see 1/5 of the available properties advertised from time to time. Most lots are not advertised at all. Homes that are severely outdated can take years to sell even when listed exclusively with one of the many real estate companies in the area.

It’s really depressing to try so hard to keep your house perfect and then have no viewers and no buyers. It makes you think that there is something really wrong with your property. But wait! There is more to the story than I was telling at the beginning. When our listing with the latest “Million Dollar Realtor” expired without any buyers, we gave up on “real estate professionals”. They weren’t doing what we needed them to do. They weren’t spreading the word. We had to do it ourselves. We went for the tried and true.

We placed a “for sale by owner” ad in the local Sunday paper. A nice couple came and looked at our house, they loved it and bought it for the asking price…the same price we had listed with the real estate companies. Listing your home, organizing it well, and pricing it fairly will work to sell your home, whether you pay a real estate professional or not.

The only thing we skipped was paying an incompetent and uncaring real estate agent who would have required us to do the house ourselves and carefully price it. Best of all, we didn’t have to pay any agency 6% of our sale price.

That little ad was a great bargain, wasn’t it? It sure did the job and quickly, too. An attorney took care of the legal details for a reasonable fee and WE’RE DONE! A quick sale CAN happen. It did it for us when the expensive option failed us.