Anyone sold a house themselves

[trales]

We are planning to sell our house and move to Boston. DH has been commuting and is gone 15 hours a day, 2.5 of it on a bus, time to move closer. I would like to try and sell ourselves since the market is not as great, we bought high, Boston is expensive etc. How did you do it? Did you use Craig's list, I sold my house.com, the local paper. I would love to hear your advice.

Boston mama's, what neighborhoods? I hate to drive, grew up in a city and DH wants to take train/subway to work. Assume we cannot afford Beacon Hill or Back Bay.

[Lilysmom06]

We sold our last house ourselves last summer. We lived in SE Massachusetts, and the market had definitely cooled. The best advice I can give you is to price it right! We had initially priced it too high, and got no offers. One weekend, we lowered to price to what we were willing to take, had a very successful open house, and got 5 offers!

We advertised just in our local newspapers real estate section. Definitely spend the money to include a picture - that helped a lot, we got more calls when we did. Most weeks we just advertised that way, and people would call to make appointments to see the house. We had 2 open houses as well.

Also, put a sign in front of your house. A big one. With easy to read numbers. We used the number/letter stickers from home depot. I hate to drive by a sign, and not be able to read it! We got many calls from the sign alone.

Make sure the front of the house is as inviting as possible, so people will want to call!

We got a prepaid cellphone, so prospective buyers didn't have our home number. We also typed up a listing sheet to give people as they walked through - similar to what an agent would give out.

I would recommend having paperwork available for the buyers to make an offer. We got ours from a real estate friend, but I am sure you can find them online. Basically, just a way for people to write their offer down, and a place for them to sign it as well.

We had a lawyer handle much of the paperwork. Once we had the written offer, we had the buyers make out a check (I think for $100) in the lawyers name to act as a deposit. The lawyer then did the Purchase and Sales agreement, and they put down the rest of their deposit for the lawyer to hold in escrow. Their mortgage broker, and our lawyer did all the rest of the paperwork. We paid about $600 for the lawyer. He also did the deed.

The only other thing I can think of now is to make sure you get a fire certificate - can't complete the sale otherwise!

I was really stressed about the whole thing, but overall it wasn't much worse than selling it with an agent. I think more and more people are open to buying directly from For Sale by Owner. And, you can price your home better, because you don't have to figure in a commission. Agents will tell you that you need to be on the Multiple Listing Service to get it sold, but you don't have much to loose trying it yourself. You can always sign up with an agent if it doesn't work out. And just wait - agents will be calling you like crazy trying to get the listing!

Good luck - let me know if you have any other questions.

Kathy