Thursday, March 02, 2006

Uprooting

We don't know for certain, but most of our future plans involve selling our house this summer. I talked to a broker and he told us they would make us the lovely deal of charging ONLY $11,000 in fees to list our cottage for sale. My wife has a friend who sells houses but in that business it seems like even friends are not very helpful. If we could get our house listed with an MLS number I'm sure it would sell itself though I know nothing of the paperwork involved. Does anyone have any advice on the best way to sell a house?

3 comments:

PsychDoctor said...

I will answer from my experience later, but I actually had to take $4000 to closing to get out of our house with one mortgage. :)

PsychDoctor said...

We had our home listed for a long time (2 years) and could never sell it...we then listed with a couple of incompetent real estate agents (one who specialized in selling mansions...which ours was not and the other who listed our home built in 1998 as older than 1960 on the MLS. No wonder we didnt' get any hits.

When we finally listed the home with someone competent, it sold within 6 weeks. However, after paying him the fees we were in the hole $4000. We would have made a $10,000 profit on our home if we hadn't had a realtor, but who knows if we ever could have sold it. Also, I wouldn't know how to close the deal once an offer was made if I was selling it myself. I am sure the people at the bank would know the process of transferring ownership and could facilitate for a reasonable fee (which would be less than $10,000).

If you try selling it yourself, make sure that the price is reasonable...You can search MLS (I think) for homes in your city that have sold to find out what the market is like. Then pick a comparable price to sell your own home. You ought to call our sister Shannon...she could probably give you some good advice. Nativeminnow could give you her number. Again, realtors are expensive, but at least they are able to get the home some exposure on internet websites and real estate magazines...

When do you have to be out of the home? If you have time, you could actually benefit from listing it yourself and putting ads in the paper/internet...

Gordon said...

I've seen a number of homes listed with

http://www.helpusell.com/

I've heard they're a lot cheaper. I've seen some fairly pricey stuff in the Avenues listed using them, and they seemed to sell all right.