I get lots of calls asking me to look at people’s homes. Sometimes I buy them, sometimes I don’t. But inevitably I hear the same question over and over – ‘How can I sell my home myself?’
It’s a very familiar question to me, and I’ve come up with several good answers right off the top of my head. But keep in mind that each individual homeowner’s particular circumstance will play into the answers.
In order to sell a home, you have to understand that it’s not all truly about selling your home. This is not the problem. It’s more about finding the right buyer. So I’d like to focus on what takes place once we find a good potential buyer, because this is when we have the best chance of selling the home. So the first move is to find this buyer, whether you do it yourself, or do it through an agent. But somebody has to find that buyer.
Now it would be great if that was all there was to it. Sadly, it’s not. Finding a buyer is only the starting point for a long and lengthy process that leads to closing day. But after your buyer has been found, you need to qualify them. Most people who have never sold a home before don’t understand exactly what I mean.
When you’re qualifying a buyer, you’re involved in a process of verification, to see if that person, or that couple, has a sufficient income, credit, or savings to get approved for obtaining a mortgage loan. This isn’t usually the job of a homeowner. Verifying credit and employer information is usually someone else’s work. But when you sell your own home, you get this job. It’s not really all that hard, you just need to know the right people to call.
Any mortgage lender would do this for you, and making the mortgage loan, but in the time it takes for you to make a deal with your buyer, a good amount of time might have elapsed. This is a time when you don’t really know for sure if the home has been sold or not, mostly because you aren’t sure if your potential buyer qualifies for the loan. » Read more: Selling FSBO – Qualify Your Buyer First
