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What Are A Seller's Options?

Sellers Have A Finite Number Of Options

You've got a piece of real estate you need to sell. Perhaps you need to sell it quickly or maybe it needs a lot of expense renovations in order to sell. Whatever your situation you have a finite number of options available to you to dispose of that property. In this article we are going to name these options and provide a little bit of information about each one. Caution: this is not intended to be an exhaustive study of this subject. Contact us, or some other real estate professional, to get feedback on your exact situation.

What Counts Is How Much Of The Sale Price Goes In Your Pocket!

One thing many people are not aware of is that if you sell a property the traditional way, using a real estate agent, in many cases you may only put into your pocket 90 percent of the sale price of the property. These is due to a number of fees that are part of the traditional transaction and which are difficult to avoid. These are:

Fee to the seller's real estate agent; usually three percent
Fee to the buyer's real estate agent; usually three percent
Closing and other costs associated with the sales transaction; these typically range from two to four percent

Add that up and you've got fees equal to ten percent of the sale price! So, sellers, please keep in mind that in most cases you're only going to pocket 90 to 92 percent of your sale price.

Option 1: Sell It Yourself (FSBO)

This is called For Sale By Owner (FSBO, pronounced fizz-bow) and is becoming increasingly popular with sellers. It works best in a "seller's market," meaning one with more buyers than properties available on the market. With this option you eliminate the seller's agent fee and you might even avoid the buyer's agent fee--however, but we feel that not offering the buyer's agent fee significantly hurts your changes of finding a buyer. In general, using the FSBO option to sell your house will allow you to put more money in your pocket than any other option--just realize that you'll also need to do more work to complete the sale than with any other option.

Option 2: Sell It Using A Real Estate Agent

This is the traditional way to sell a house and for many people it is a good option. It has many advantages. For example, the realtor handles all the marketing, negotiations and contracts. If you're not in too much of a hurry to sell--and you don't want to take on the work of selling the FSBO route--this is often the best option. You'll net less money than the FSBO option, but more than you will when selling to an investor.

Option 3: Sell To An Investor

This is where we come in! As we have said elsewhere on this site, our services are not a fit for everyone. In general, if you are under no particular time pressure to sell, need most of your cash out of the property, can manage any repairs the property might need to sell easily, and/or are not behind on payments and so forth we're probably not your your best bet--see Options 1 and 2 above.

We talk to sellers all the time and it's not unusual for us to end up advising them to go the FSBO or Real Estate agent route to sell their home. Why do we do this? Our business is based on working out a win-win solution with our customers. If in our judgement it's in the sellers best interest is to sell their house without using our services we tell them that.

However, not everyone finds themselves in the circumstances above. Sometimes selling the house quickly is critical and the seller just can't want for the traditional Real Estate agent process to run its course. Or, the house may need a lot of expensive repairs. Or, it might be a vacant rental home and the owner is tired of being a landlord. Or, the house might be behind on payments.

Truthfully, there are thousands of reasons why a property becomes a burden to its owner. And when that occurs professional investors, like ourselves, are often an attractive alternative. In fact, in many case we are the only viable alternative. Will a Real Estate agent pay off your backlogged mortgage payments or use their own funds to renovate the property for sale? No. This is what investors do.

In Summary

Sellers have a finite number of options available to them. They should explore all of them and chose the one that is right for their particular situation.

If you would like us to provide you with a free, no obligation evaluation of your situation use our on-line form (link) or call us at 800-651-3368.