I have had my home on the market for 90 days now, and I get a lot of questions about what it is like to sell your home by owner.  So, I thought I would take some time to talk about how it has been so far. As some background information, I decided to list my house for 6 months by owner before I hired a real estate agent.  The big justification for doing so is the 3% savings I could potentially see if I am successful.  At $150,000, that rounds out to $4,500—not a small chunk of change.

Marketing. I am going to start out with the most important part of the process—marketing.  My experience is from the St. Louis market, but I am pretty sure it would transfer to where you are at.  To date, I have considered several forms of marketing:  (1) craigslist, (2) word of mouth, (3) newspaper, (4) flat-fee MLS, and (5) signage.  Out of those, I have implemented 1, 2, 4, and 5.  I decided not to put my property up in the newspaper because my local paper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, is priced ridiculous.  Their  packages start at $300 for web and paper coverage.  And, honestly, when I looked around the listing, I saw very few FSBO homes.  I wonder why.  Out of the the four marketing avenues I have worked, to date I have only received responses from items 4 and 5—the flat-fee MLS and signage.  Both of these have been extremely effective.  This week alone I have gotten 1 walk through from signage, 1 walk through from the flat-fee MLS, and 1 call from the flat-fee MLS.  Surprisingly, I have received zero serious inquiries from craigslist.  I say “serious” because I do get emailed spammed left-and-right from local real estate agents every time I post there.  I attribute this to two reasons:  (1) most people buying a house have a buyer’s agent and they use the MLS and (2) craigslist is overwhelmed with listings in the real estate section.

By the way, if you are interested in going the flat-fee route, I recommend soldbyme.com in the St. Louis area.  They have been great.

Showings. Showing by far are the worst part of selling a home.  Before I started doing showings, I thought the 3% commission was outrageous.  Now, I am coming around a bit because when you are selling your home, you personally have to do all the work.  In terms of actually doing the showings, my lessons learned are pretty simple:  (1) keep your house clean, (2) protect yourself, (3) be honest about the situation, and (4) stay out of the other realtor’s way.  One is pretty self explanatory, so I will skip it.

To protect myself, I do three things.  The first is that I reverse phone lookup anyone that calls me.  90% of the time it will trace back to a real estate office, so you know that the call is valid.  The second thing I do is I look up the person on Google.  It is a good validation check, and often you get match a name with a face.  The third thing that I do is when I am showing the house, I get a card and often get the license plate of the realtor.  This is easy if you follow step #4.  This all might be overkill, but I don’t think you can be too careful when dealing with strangers.

The next two lessons-learned are related and can be really grouped into one tenant:  respect the other realtor.  When I get a call, I am always upfront and explain that my house is for sale by owner, I listed it on the MLS using a flat-fee broker, and that I will (and am obligated) to pay their commission.  Believe it or not, most realtors do not run into this situation on a daily basis.  In fact, I have gotten a number of questions about how I listed my house on the MLS.  So, this upfront honesty is important.  The next piece of advice is from HGTV, but I think it holds true:  stay out of the other realtor’s way.  I let the other realtor show the house.  In fact, I go outside for every showing.  It is 10 degrees outside right now, so believe me, it is tough.  But, the worst thing you can do when you show a house is to walk around with the other realtor.  Of course, it goes without saying, to not keep anything small of value laying around your house.  I figure I should be able to notice if someone walks out with my HDTV.

Frustrations. I think the biggest frustration I have had when showing the house, is that lack of notice you often get.  I often get a call in the morning for an afternoon showing.  I am not sure if this is the industry standard, but I think that this would be pretty tough for families even if you went the traditional route of selling your home.  The second big frustration is the lack of background research other realtors do before showing a house.  I have a two story town home, and I have gotten a couple walk throughs where the biggest complaint was that people did not like steps.  I think the realtor probably should have eliminated this earlier in the process.  These incidents are pretty isolated, but when it happens, it is a bit annoying.

Conclusion. Overall, I am really trying to be positive about the process.  Of course, if I sell the property, it will be worth the time and effort.  But, if I come out empty handed, I am not sure I will feel the same way.  In the end, the process provided a good life lesson and really gave me a lot of insight into the process of buying and selling a home.

To follow up on Eric’s experience, I figured I would give my personal account of the election this year.  I woke up around 6:10AM (about a half an hour early) went to the polling station, sat in line for 40 minutes and cast my vote.  Sitting in line was normal enough.  A young lady three people back was complaining because she had to be at school to teach by 7:30AM.  And, a younger man in front of me conversed with an older man behind me.  They talked mostly about Saturday night live.  I felt that each was trying to keep hidden whom they were voting for.  I did think I heard a “pew pew” reference.  But, I was kind of dazing off thinking about my fantasy sports team, so I did not pay too much attention.

Voting in my parts was done with a black marker and plain-looking ballot.  I did notice in the corner there was a suspicious looking Diebold machine.  When I inquired about the machine, the lady behind the desk said that not to worry because it was being guarded by a sleepy looking poll worker.  He interjected that the machine was to be used for the blind.  I remember thinking “what a pity that the blind would not have his or her vote counted”.  I was given my card and cast a vote for Obama.  I found it quite odd that just 8 years before I had cast a vote for Bush.

I walked out of the building with a smile feeling good about doing my duty (that sounds dirty) and voting.  Just as I was about to cross the street toward my car, a middle aged gentlemen inquired into what door he should go.  I said “try that one down there”.  He said “Thanks. Sorry, I am a bit out of it today.  The economy is in a wreck, the anti-Christ is taking over, and we are all going to die.”  That quickly wiped the smile off my face as I booked it to my car.

Update:  Well, it looks like Obama has won the election.  McCain gave one of the better concessionary speeches I have heard.  I have said before that either of the two candidates would make a good president.  But, it looks like tonight is Obama’s night.  Now, it is time to start fixing some of the problems.  And, it is time for me to write about something other than politics.

Update #2:  Great speech by Obama.  I am going to sleep.

I am back from a weekend of visiting my family in Cleveland, Ohio—the home of the Buckeyes and that mean roller coaster you see pictured above, the Top Thrill Dragster.  It was the single greatest roller coaster I have ever been on in my life.  It shoots you up a 420ft hill at 125mph.  You then scream back to earth twisting as you fall.  To give St. Louisans some perspective, Mr Freeze at Six Flags is a mere 226ft and only reaches about 70mph.  This is nearly twice as high and a little less than twice as fast.

I highly recommend that if you are ever in the area, take a detour and visit Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio.  The Top Thrill Dragster is the next best thing to being shot out of a cannon.  And, it is probably a little safer too.

As an added bonus, I added some video I took of the coaster taking off on flickr.

While, I am a little late posting. I thought I would write a brief entry about what it was like to be in the earthquakes today in St. Louis. According to the USGS, we had a 5.2, a 4.6, and a number of earthquakes ranging from 2-3 in magnitude. The first quake woke me up sometime around 4 in the morning. It was more surprising, than frightening. It came with a low rumble and a lot of shaking. It reminded me of a plane taking off, but the sound and shaking came in waves. In addition, there was an electrical component to the sound. You could hear the faint popping of far off transformers. The sound reminded me a lot of the ice storms we had during the winter, where the trees would fall and sever power lines. During the second quake, I was sitting in my cube at work. The building I was in was more substantial and the quake was less in magnitude, so it had less of effect.

Overall, I thought the experience was unique and it really put me in awe of the power of nature. I would not mind going through another 28 years of my life without experiencing another quake.