Posts Tagged selling your house for sale by owner
Making Your Open House a “Smashing Success”
If you are selling your house “for sale by owner”, I suggest you combine appointments with potential buyers with an open house. Keep your open house short – no more than two hours, from 1 – 3 pm or 2 – 4 pm. You want to create a crowd!
Be sure to place your classified ads early in the week for your open house! Place ads everywhere you are currently doing your FSBO marketing. Here are some great places to advertise your open house: 
- Pennysaver.com
- Craigslist.org
- Your FSBO listing service
- Your FSBO MLS listing
- Local newspapers
You want to make the house easy to find. Put up a special open house sign or add an open house rider to your “for sale” sign. Put up directional signs or bandit signs around your neighborhood, especially at the nearest busy intersections. Be sure to take them down after the open house, of course.
Pass flyers out to your neighbors, inviting them to your open house and offering a $500 referral fee. Neighbors love to visit these and may know someone perfect for your house!
Buy a bunch of helium balloons to put in your front yard on open house day.
If your house has special unique features that people might miss, set out little cards to draw attention. For example, an “open me” card on a kitchen cabinet draws attention to a unique feature inside.
Have a sign-in sheet on a clipboard and some pens ready. Get everyone’s email for following up.
Bake some cookies to make the house smell wonderful. Offer them along with bottled water (no drinks that stain).
Set up an area where buyers can see and pick up information you have prepared, including:
- Property Information Flyers. Include lots of pictures so people clearly remember your house
.- Loan Program Flyers. Have a mortgage broker give you promotional material for appropriate loan programs. Better yet, see if he’ll attend your open house. This is a great benefit you could provide to your buyers and yourself.
- A “Sales Scrapbook”. Put copies of all your warranties, manuals, receipts for recent work, inspection reports, recent appraisal, copy of the new home warranty you will be supplying, and any similar materials in a 3-ring binder. This makes you look impressively organized and makes your house seem well-cared for. Wouldn’t you rather buy a used car from someone that kept a detailed service log? Same goes with houses!
SOME TIPS FOR YOUR APPOINTMENTS AND OPEN HOUSES
It goes without saying that you have previously repaired, decluttered, depersonalized, cleaned, and staged your house to get it ready to sell.
No smoking. That means you and your visitors!
No pets: Have your pets go elsewhere for the afternoon. Hide the water bowls, beds, crates, toys, kitty litter boxes, and leashes. Some people are so allergic to pets that seeing evidence of them will put them right off your house.
No bad smells: Get a dehumidifier if your basement is damp. If your house doesn’t smell as fresh as you would like get a good air purifier.
Use Oust (unscented version) in the bathrooms or any room that smells less than great. Don’t use anything that has a strong scent as some people are allergic to chemicals in room fresheners, too.
No TV: Turn it off. If there is a big game on that weekend, don’t have an open house.
Take care with kids: If your kids are there, they should be on their best behavior. Playing (quietly) in the yard, reading on their bed, or doing homework would be perfect.
Take security precautions: It is best to have at least one other person helping you. Hide your valuables. Turn off your computers. Hide your laptop. Think what a bad day it would be if someone snuck out with it.
Never be discouraged if you have a light turn out at your open house. I once had an open house and only one couple show up. But I quickly got over my disappointment when they bought the house!
When Selling Your House, Your Best Leads May be In Your Own Backyard
I read this startling statistic from two places in the last week, “One out of three FSBO sellers sell their house to someone they already know!” Wow – this is huge!
So if you are selling your house for sale by owner make sure to put the proper energy into your grass roots, neighborhood marketing. Even if you are certain you want to list with an agent, it wouldn’t hurt to do this first for a week or two and see if you could sell your house yourself and save the commission.
So here is what I consider an effective grass roots marketing campaign that is virtually free, besides.
Word of Mouth Marketing
The easiest free advertising is to tell everyone you know. Always mention and honor that you will give a $500 referral fee to whoever brings you a buyer (someone who actually buys your house).
Use Social Media Marketing
If you belong to any of the social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., mention your house.
Change Your Phone Messages
Change any cute or unusual messages on any of your phones temporarily. No kids, weird music, or jokes. You need to sound professional so people will want to deal with you. Change your voice mail greetings on your land line and cell phones to mention “If you are calling about my house for sale….” and leave a glowing description of your house.
Do an Email Blast
You can send an email blast to your friends and family with an attachment of your great looking flyer and ask them to pass it along. Offer the $500 referral fee here, too.
Add your marketing phone number, email, and website to your email signature, along with a quick blurb about your house being for sale so you don’t forget to tell anybody.
Property Information Flyers
Design an attractive property flyer and have flyers in your brochure box. Pass this same flyer out to your neighbors, offering a $500 referral fee. They may just make the effort to tell people they know for $500.
Have an Open House
Consider having a “pre-sale” open house. Invite your people you know, especially your neighbors, before you put your house on the open market. Neighbors love to visit these. Even if they are just being nosey, they may know someone perfect for your house. You can hire a neighborhood kid to pass out flyers for you. Increase your attendance by having refreshments. You can make it an early going away party for yourself!
Put Up Bandit Signs
Besides the professional sign at your house, you can also put up bandit signs at highly visible spots in your area. This type of sign is very effective. They aren’t supposed to be beautiful, but they sure attract a lot of attention.
There are three sources for these – if you are in a hurry, you can buy white coroplast signs from hardware stores for about $10 each. Personally, I wouldn’t spend this much money on them. I get them online for about $1 each. It’s OK to use the inexpensive H-wires for these. Get a jumbo width permanent marker. Plan on 10 minutes to write each sign. I use a sites online where you can order eye-catching bandit signs that look hand written but aren’t. This saves you the trouble of printing up extra signs. If you live in an area where there are enforced anti-bandit sign laws, skip this idea.
Put Up Some Handmade Posters
Buy some neon colored, 8 ½ x 11 paper and make a poster. These are the “lost dog” type of signs. They need to have big, readable lettering, no pictures. Put these on light poles and telephone poles, and at bus stops, with duct tape, push pins, or packing tape.
Go around your local area with some pushpins and tape in hand and put your flyers up on bulletin boards in grocery stores, coffees shops, where you work – anywhere you can post.
Advertise in Local Newsletters
Does your workplace, church, club or membership organization have a newsletter or other printed communication? Advertise there for sure. People love to deal with those who are part of their community.
Whether selling FSBO or using an agent, why not do a grass roots marketing campaign before listing on MLS? You can market aggressively for a week or two and see what happens. You might just be one of the lucky one-in-three that can sell their house this way. What have you got to lose?
Considering Selling FSBO by Round Robin?
If you are selling your house for sale by owner, or FSBO, you may be considering a “round robin” auction. That is where the seller advertises an unrealistically low price to create a flurry of interest, then holds an extended weekend-long open house. What the buyers don’t know is the seller’s “reserve price” can be anything the seller wants. The highest bid needs to exceed the reserve or else the seller won’t sell the house.
On Sunday night, the seller systematically calls the buyers asking for their highest bid. This goes round and round until all but one buyer has dropped out. Sort of sounds like poker, doesn’t it? And it is probably as big of a gamble.
I know real estate investors in some parts of the country who have been very successful at this. This is definitely not something I would recommend for a home selling novice.
I recently spoke with a woman who held one of these. Her reserve price was $300,000, but she advertised her house for $167,000 or best offer, as the “round robin” advice suggests. She was inundated with gawkers who thought she really was selling for $167,000. The people that showed up were actually angry with her. They expected a steal – they assumed it was a foreclosure! She called it a “total disaster”.
What do you think the chances of a qualified buyer wanting to pay a decent price showing up for an event like this are? Slim to none, I would say. You will attract bargain seekers of all kinds.
I hope this gives you a new perspective in case you are considering this as a strategy to sell your own house.
