Two Birds, One Stone

So my little experiment with for-sale-by-owner home selling was a great success. In May I had an accepted offer with all subjects removed and a closing date coming up soon. I rented a moving truck, convinced a buddy to help with the heavy stuff and proceeded to move all my things out. That afternoon, my building caught fire which resulted in some minor water damage to my unit. My flooring needed to be replaced and pushed back any possibility of being able to move things into my place. Needless to say the deal fell through. But I had a sale locked and loaded. How much did this cost me? $50 in google adwords (which did not perform very well and ultimately a waste of money), $40 in Kijiji.ca sponsorship, $50 in local classifieds ads, and roughly $600 in notary fees that I would have incurred had the deal gone through. So, all told, it cost me less than $1000 to sell my condo. Compare this with the roughly 6-8% that I would have paid to a realtor in commission and you can quickly see the value here. I have a really nice condo and it shows very well, thus my strategy was to get people in to see it and let it sell itself. So I hosted 3 open houses, which attracted roughly 20 interested parties and received two offers (one offer leading to the sale). Granted, this cost me time, but not much. I spent roughly 30 hours in total on everything (photos, website, ads, showings, etc). So unless you value your time at over $1000/hr, you can afford to spend the extra time on this (or hire some kid to do it for you). In summary, here are my take-aways and advice for selling yourself in a flat market:

1. Run frequent open houses yourself. Run them for 2 hours on the weekends and maybe through in the odd weekday open house. People want to see and walk through the place and who knows it better than you. It also gives prospective buyers a chance to come back without having to phone you and book a private showing.
2. Stage, stage, stage. People claim to be able to see past the clutter, but they are wrong. If you have nasty furniture, get rid of it. If have cluttered space, get rid of the clutter.
3. Spend ad money on local ads. Half the people coming to my open houses were retirees who found the open house in the local paper. The other half found out through Kijiji or Craigslist. Be sure to tell your facebook friends about your house, you never know who knows someone who’s looking. Google ads drove some traffic to my website, but they didn’t convert.
4. Take great photos. If your a photographer, great. If not, find a friend who is. Certainly you know someone who is interested in photography. Fill the room with as much natural light as you can and don’t shoot so they look like a realtor took them from shoulder height using a cheap point-and-shoot. Shoot from above head height, it makes the rooms look bigger and it’s a more interesting angle.
5. Use a notary to write up the sale. Notaries do this all the time and know how it works. You’ll likely save $500 over a lawyer. But when you are the seller, you don’t have to do anything. Just tell your buyer to go get a notary to write up the offer. You should have a notary in mind for your end of the offer though.

That’s pretty much it. I also had a website with a custom domain thinking that google adwords and SEO might be come into play, but it didn’t really. So if you have the skill or time to make a website, it’s handy to tell people a URL, but I’m not convinced it’s necessary. It’s not that expensive and it’s not that hard. I would also argue that using a realtor for these things actually erodes value as they are likely not going to be as effective as doing things yourself. The ONLY value I see that a realtor brings is access to the monopoly that is MLS (but that might be changing soon). So now that my condo is fixed and ready to sell again, I’m giving it another go. I have some different strategies this time given the slight market changes and my timing before Christmas. Wish me luck.