I'd greatly appreciate your tips on how to sell a property privately. Mine is absolutely zero experience. Thanks.
Private Home Sale
Bab on 05/02/2017 - 11:18
Comments
Have sold 5 privately now, 3 were 1st open all but one full price or better - a piece of cake.
In regard to selling a property yourself the following applies.
We use this FSBO $99 deal ( http://fsbo.com/sellers ) then you have access to the realestate.com.au etc. advert placements and when doing so make sure you take plenty of good clear pictures and use the homes best features, a floor plan is also very good. In text have info like location to schools, transport, shopping etc. You only need to do the advert once it then sends it to a host of R/E FS sites. Their on forwarding/contact services works very well too.
But unless you are able to follow this criteria you will get a lot less for your property or it will not sell, so the effort is well worth it.
a) House must be uncluttered! (or sell or move items to garage!!)
b) House must be tidy and clean, externals like lawn & edging also neat as a pin.
c) Have open homes on weekends say an hour or more between 10am and noon.
d) Let buyers look around for few minutes then advise them of its location & best features
e) Supply a colour brochure on the house to all who visit (this reminds them of your place later)
and attach an offer form like this ( https://tinyurl.com/hl2kyus )f) Before going to market contact a solicitor (or conveyancer) to be on the ready to contract for you.
If your a hoarder start by selling goods not used on Gumtree. The biggest turn off for buyers is clutter!
Once you agree on a price your solicitor/conveyancer will prepare a contract and send it to the buyers conveyancer, it will return with usual finance and building inspection clauses. Under no circumstances take any money directly from buyer leave it up to contract time!.
When you sell and save about $10/20,000 you’ll be so glad you followed above 😝.
Thanks but fobs.com appears to be for US and Canada.
@Foxtail
Sorry but can you explain "Under no circumstances take any money directly from buyer leave it up to contract time!"
I'm also new to this but very interested in the process.
Taking a deposit from a buyer can and has been known to cause problems of who paid who, just dont do it and its rare anyway. Leave it all up to your conveyancer.
You might save $20-100k depending on the house, but you might loose out on $100k-$1Mill by not playing the Real Estate game. I begrudge making agents rich, but if it means I'm considerably better off at the end of the day, so be it.
I and stacks of friends who have sold privately have never found this so, actually the opposite.
There is an old saying "no one knows your house like you do". But hey selling privately is not for everyone, many just can't do it.
Check out the raft of private ad agencies online popping up everywhere over past few years with no commissions?.
https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#newwindow=1&q=sell+pri…
I also disagree. When my parents were selling their home, every agent was trying to sell for a very low figure. My parents ended up selling the house for $300K more than the best offer received via an agent. The house was listed with agents for a short time, but they ripped my parents off.
Never will I deal with an agent to sell a property, they can't be trusted.
Sorry will find the correct link its on another computer.
HERE..
edited
Can use any of them but this one was lowest price.
oops was this one, fantastic service too, from Rick the owner to the instant call on-forward enquires centre.
Was able to edit the ads on realestate.com.au myself as well as insert open house times.
You might need some signs too, easy to make up sandwich boards - ply & brackets from Bunnings, Officeworks or local sign Co. to make up and / or print out. My wife was a graphic designer so was ok!.
Foxtail item C. Have open home twice - once in the morning for the earlybirds, and another in the afternoon for the weekend workers/sports people.
Forget about outdoor advertising - it's the web (RE.com.au etc) where you'll get the bites from. Outside signs will attract the neighbours/tyre kickers and waste your time.
Have a plate of food (e.g. fresh cooked muffins) and ice cold drinks available for people but niot a banquet. It gets them to stop and reflect, and a chance for you to talk to them.
Have slow music playing quietly.
Suss out if they're ready to buy, or thinking about it or just comparing with a recent purchase. It's a numbers game.
Do up a A4 colour flyer full of photos and a floor plan with measurements for them to take away and work out where their furniture goes.Take some flyers to all auctions in your area, wait for the crowd to disperse, find the losers and hand them out AFTER the auction - as people walk away. (Guerrilla advertising). Be brave.
Done it myself - saved enough commission to buy a new car !!
Your buyer will probably be in a 5km radius of you.
And have a book to sign at the front door and hand them the pen before entering. It saves asking later and gives them an idea of their possible competition. Put in some "falses" with nice comments. "Love the kitchen"
https://www.buymyplace.com.au not associated with.We had no signs for the pad in the complex was not allowed by body corp, others had sign on corners with arrow just like the… agents do.
We tried food out none ate it, fresh cake! and even no booze takers (we had a bar) Of course you ask questions like when are you buying or have you sold and settled etc. Can say have interested parties can call anytime to discuss or make offer. We found over past decade open home times before noon and after 3pm best as most agents open in between.
Selling the houses, villas and units we must of saved about $80K in commissions.
(well yeah I did buy a nice Merc)Nice work Foxtail.
I sold only once. My solicitor gave me a semi completed contract and duplicate so each party had a copy on signing.Once I bought land by approaching off the cuff. Found out the owners name from council records and made a $100,000 offer. Mistake was I only wrote the numerals and not the words "one hundred thousand dollars"
On settlement, vendor said where is the $109000 ? They interpreted the 0, as a 9 and so wanted out of the deal.
Block was easily worth $110,000 at the time.
My solicitor showed them our duplicate of the contract, and fortunately it was clearly $100,000.
Lesson for today, when all is agreed, write the final contract price in words.
We found prospective buyers would not sign anything until they consulted their lawyer, even the offer form, so didn't bother with having a contract to hand it didn't delay the sales.
may not be legal to offer a house for sale without contract. dept of fair trading in NSW is strict about that and real estate agents cannot show a property without the contract.
In 2007 my partner inherited her parents' house in Dalkeith, the first or second most expensive suburb in Perth. It was a very rundown 1920s house with 1012m2 of land.
We investigated the options of:
i. Living there
Would have needed a lot of work and we wouldn't have been able to access the value tied up in the property.
ii. Renting it out
Return on capital would have been less than 1%.
iii. Building a mansion
We would have lived in the guest bedroom/granny flat and not touched the rest of the house for long enough to get CGT exemption.
Because the property was worth $2.2 million we would have had to build a $3 or $4 million property. We checked with bank and we could have funded the progress payments on an interest only loan. It would have taken 2 years to build and we would have been trying to sell at height of GFC property price collapse. We are extremely glad we decided not to proceed with this option.
iv. Selling through an agent or privately
I contacted half a dozen agents and got them to give me an idea of selling price. This was just after agents' fees, which had been fixed at 2%, had been deregulated. Supposedly, this would introduce competition into the market and agents would negotiate on price. All it meant was that they all standardised on 3% + GST. The only reduction I was able to get from one agent was for them to absorb GST.
I asked why they thought they should get $66,000 when it would require the same amount of effort to sell our property as to sell a $1 million house. They said that was the way it is.
I suggested an incentive scheme where they would charge a fixed fee and get a percentage, say 10%, of anything they could get above estimated sale price. Nope.
Partner's father's friend who was real estate agent said that he had been promised the sale. We said that verbal agreement with deceased person wasn’t binding.
We had previously successfully sold my partner’s unit privately so we decided to do it again.
It was relatively easy to determine a selling price because there had been half a dozen sales of very similar properties in the same street in the previous 18 months so I was able to graph the prices and show the increase (which was at bubble level at the time). There was a same vintage house that had been done up and had a pool on the market at the same time so that gave an upper limit on the price.
I advertised in local, interstate and Singapore papers and on the Internet. We only got responses from the local paper. Remember this was 2007 so Internet sales weren’t as big as they are now.
I had an info sheet setting out all information regarding property, eg rates and taxes, local amenities and selling price trends.
We had midweek after hours and weekend home opens.
After first one, sleazy agent offered $1.9 million cash.
No nibbles at second opening.
At third weekend opening there was one interested party.
I was asked whether we would negotiate on price. I said that they could see from sales history and current for sale prices that asking price was market value so no.
However, we heard nothing all week. Oh oh. Then on Friday they made an offer for full price which we accepted.
In WA you can do your own conveyancing. My partner worked in a legal office so we were able to get free advice from one of the lawyers but we could have done it completely on our own because the process is clearly laid out on the Internet.
The purchasers originally said they wanted to settle on 28 June (Yeah!) but in the offer they said 2 July. This was a big deal because this was the time when you could pay $1 million into super tax free before 1 July.
We borrowed $2 million for 3 days. It cost over $1500 in fees but it was worth it.
The new owners built a very large McMansion.
We retired a few weeks after the sale.
Well done, especially in those days, it was about the time we commenced selling ours.
We had investment properties and homes. all but one we sold privately, just could not come at these commissions. In Qld they changed the comms from 5% of 1st $18K + 2% , now its more like 3.25% WHY?.
A neighbour wanted to sell his complex villa he had no interest in selling privately as he works crazy hours, I told him to neg. with agents he did, paid 2% . He said not one of the agents he interviewed mentioned anything about negotiating the commission. His same size and layout as our villa I sold mine myself and got more than his and saved $10K plus in commission.
Go to the Neil Jenman site to read about the tricks played by real estate agents. Ask for a copy of his free books on how to sell your house privately.
Hmm. It looks like a couple of the books are no longer free but the ones at the bottom of the Books menu item are still free. Have a prowl around the web site for lots of good info.
Yes been there before, Jenman tells it how it is and has been doing so for ages, he sure gave it to the establishment 😝
and one of many surveys elsewhere says..
http://www.themercury.com.au/news/national/most-ethical-and-…
Find buyer, see lawyer to write up contract.