Many home sellers wonder if “For Sale By Owner” is a smart thing to do in today’s real estate market, which is a buyer’s market.

With the number of homes for sale far exceeding the number of people looking for homes to buy, it’s a great situation for buyers but a tough situation for sellers.

Many people think that it is difficult to sell houses and that “for sale by owner” may not be a good way to do it. They say that the difficulty of selling houses means that every seller must have a real estate expert who has experience selling houses.

The problem with this line of thinking is that listing your home with a real estate agent does not guarantee a quick sale. It does not guarantee a sale at its sale price. It does not guarantee that your home will be fixed up and “staged” to look immaculate and attractive to buyers. It does not guarantee that your home will be marketed in a special way to make it stand out from the thousands of other homes on the market.

Two areas where real estate agents fail to help you sell your home are advertising and marketing your home on the Internet.

Advertising

A real estate agent might say that “listing your house is not a guarantee of getting the right buyer.” However, it may be true that some of the money you save in real estate agent commissions can be spent on advertising your home. Most real estate agents bundle your house with dozens of other houses. The ads you buy are to advertise the real estate company, not your home.

internet marketing

A real estate agent might say that your home should be marketed through your website that gets traffic, and it should be on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) to attract potential buyers.

The truth is, your home is being lost on the internet and buyers are not seeing it. This is because your home’s website is bundled with hundreds of others from the same or other real estate agents. It is often mentioned that you need to be on the Realtors.com website to attract buyers. But there are over 3.7 million properties listed on that one website.

Also, you can register with MLS even if you don’t have a listing contract with a real estate agent. Any real estate agent who says they need to be on the MLS is not telling the truth. What works best is to combine an MLS listing (which costs several hundred dollars) with your own custom website that stands alone.

An independent website that is marketed on the Internet separately will attract a lot of attention from the buyer. There are dozens of things you can do to market your custom website that you can’t do when your home is only listed on Realtors.com or real estate company websites.