It's easy to sell your home yourself!

Offering to pay a portion of the Buyer’s closing costs is a really HUGE deal!

This needs to be promoted well & promoted often. It needs to be very prominent in all written material and needs to be verbalized to everyone at least once!

Even if your neighborhood won’t support rolling these costs into the appraised value since you aren’t having to pay a commission you can afford to pay some of the Buyer’s costs. An added benefit is that if someone asks if you could take less you can say “I could but I couldn’t pay your closing costs.” That, and the appraisal stops those low offers dead because they really want &/or need to have some of their costs paid for them.

Car dealers promote financing terms more than they promote the cars they are selling. They constantly sell the downpayment and the monthly payment. When you talk to a car salesman they no longer ask how much you want to spend, they only ask how much you want to put down and how much you want to spend each month. Right or wrong, in our credit driven society that is really the most important aspect of a large purchase.

The #1 impediment to owning a home is out of pocket expense!!

By offering to pay a Buyer’s closing costs you are making it possible for many more people to buy your home. This helps you attract more Buyers. It helps you sell it quicker and gets you top dollar. It also makes your house memorable which helps it stand out from the sea of homes on the market.

By tying the act of paying their closing costs to that fact that you don’t have to pay an agent you also help keep the agents away. Agents will still bug you, just not as many. Buyers who are working with agents recognize that if they get an agent involved it will cost them money and therefore they deal with you direct. This doesn’t limit your Buyer pool in any way as we’ve found the typical Buyer works with 2 agents and looks at all FSBOs.

OPEN HOUSES ARE A GREAT OPPORTUNITY TO TALK TO PEOPLE!

First let’s look at an Open House from the eyes of a Buyer. Open Houses are great because they don’t need to call anyone or make an appointment & have to coordinate times to come back to the neighborhood. Open Houses are available right now while they are interested with no added trouble. I have bought my last 2 homes due to an Open House.

Open Houses are a big plus when Buyers are out driving neighborhoods because it gives them an easy way to look at homes and get a feel for an area or a type of home. Now it’s true that some people go to the newspapers and plan ahead but most Buyers find Open Houses serendipitously as they drive neighborhoods.

When Buyers visit open houses early in the house shopping process they are mostly trying to discover neighborhoods they want to live in. They are still researching size, features, and price while hoping they will “luck” upon the perfect house. Even if the Open House doesn’t turn out to be the perfect house they still feel they’ve done well because of the data they’ve gathered.

If Buyers already know the neighborhoods they want to live in then they are comparing houses and still looking for that perfect house.

In either case they need information to make decisions,
so when people come into your Open House don’t be passive!

This is what you’ve been hoping for, someone to tell about your house! SELL THE HOUSE! Don’t be pushy and obnoxious, but instead be helpful. They need to know about your house and neighborhood to be able to make comparisons

Say something like “Let me tell you about the house and show you a few things you might miss and then I want you to feel free to wander everywhere, open closets, etc. I’ll be available to answer all your questions before you leave. (this gives you the excuse to talk to them before they leave which is when you will gather the feedback you need.)
We’ve had the house fully appraised by a mortgage appraiser prior to putting it on the market to arrive at a fair value so that you know it’s not overpriced like most of the listed homes. (knowing the house is priced properly affects how they look at the house) AND since there are no agents involved we are offering to pay $4,000 of your closing costs if you use FINANCIER$ Mortgage Group for your financing.”

Now proceed to summarize all the good things about your house and living in that neighborhood. Once again let me say you need to SELL THE HOUSE! Don’t be pushy and obnoxious, but instead be helpful. They need to know about your house and neighborhood to be able to make comparisons.

While you may feel many features of your house are obvious, they may not be to others! You may think it is obvious that you have seriously upgraded the quality of your house or that you have installed tile floors & have new(ish) carpet, but until you mention it, it wasn’t new or special in any way - it was just there. Talk about all the work you’ve done to the house. Talk about the features and the benefits. Talk about the fun.

Buyers tell us they prefer to talk to Owners rather than to agents as they feel they get real information plus they can ask questions of you the agents could never answer. They tell us agents are always trying to hit on them and show them other houses when all they want is data about THIS house. The owners know the house and surrounds whereas the Agents use the Buyers questions as an excuse to get a phone number to bug them later.

While you are giving them data keep in mind that Buyers tend to look at homes negatively. They feel that every house they eliminate puts them that much closer to the perfect house. Although you don’t want Buyers to eliminate your house from lack of data or wrong data, you have to recognize that there is also no need for them to keep your house on the short list if they need 5 bedrooms and you only have 2. It is OK to have your house eliminated under certain circumstances.

Since you don’t know what other homes they’ve looked at or what are their hot buttons be thorough in your details. You never know what will strike a nerve and peak their interest. It is usually something very simple and basic.

You are the best salesman for your home since you are the one that knows it the most intimately! But there is a danger. you are ready to move on to something nicer so you might be more focused on it’s inadequacies for YOUR situation. Keep in mind they aren’t in your situation!

Try to remember back to what made you want your house and what you perceived were it’s great points when you bought it. You are ready to move because you want something different, bigger, smaller, closer to work, better, cheaper, etc. but you really, really loved your house when you bought it. So will they.