✋🏻Please PLEASE ✋🏻Do Not Give Your 🏡 House Away...

The Cost of Selling Without a Real Estate Agent

We have all heard of buyer’s remorse...What about Seller's Regret? Without our market expertise and sales skills to back them up, sellers who choose to sell their home on their own just may experience “seller’s regret” when they see how much less they get for what is most people's largest investment...their home. FSBOs earn an average of $60,000 to $90,000 less on the sale of their home than sellers who enlist the services of a real estate agent (and don't just use a real estate agent...use a full time professional agent!), according to the National Association of REALTORS®. 

Here’s the breakdown:

• All agent-assisted homes: $250,000 (median selling price)
• All FSBO homes: $190,000 😱😱😱
• FSBO homes when buyer knew seller: $160,300

With this kind of discrepancy, why would any seller choose to go it alone? Some may want to avoid paying an agent's commission—but even factoring that in, FSBOs still stand to make less on their home sale. “Talk to an agent and find out what they suggest for the commission, and then do the math yourself,” researchers write on NAR’s Economists’ Outlook blog. “The closing price for the agent-assisted seller is likely going to be way above a FSBO...And in reality, homes sold by the owner make less money overall.”

At Least Sellers Are Learning

Home sellers seem to be getting the message: Only 8 percent of sellers last year—an all-time low—chose to sell their home themselves, according to NAR’s 2017 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. That figure has been falling since 2004, when 14 percent of homeowners sold their own homes.

Of the share of FSBOs last year, 38 percent of the homes were sold to a buyer that the seller knew, such as a friend, neighbor, or family member. The majority of FSBO transactions, however, were sold to buyers the owner did not know.