You might be asking yourself, “Why would a real estate agent tell me to sell my own home?” Because I don’t really care if you decide to sell your own home.
I assume you have your reasons: perhaps you had a previous bad experience with a Realtor (trust me, I’ve had personal experience in this area, which is partly why I became one myself!), perhaps you don’t want to pay a commission to a listing agent (it’s definitely not the cheapest endeavor), or perhaps you just want to try it on your own. Whatever your reasons may be hopefully these tips will help make you more successful.
Put it on the Internet. It is said that 80% of home buyers begin their search on the Internet. One of the best ways to do this is 
buy your own domain name consisting of your home address. I personally like Go Daddy. It’s not always the most user friendly service, as far as I’m concerned, but you get used to it after a while and it’s the cheapest. You can get a .info address (www.123mainstreet.info) for $3. You can either use the free website they’ll give you (but they’ll run an ad bar on the top) or you can pay around $4 per month for hosting. You can go month to month and then cancel when your home sells.
In terms of featuring your home on the Internet I’m a huge fan of WordPress. With your own domain you can have your address as the main url, like I do with www.theskinnyonrealestate.com or www.bethskinner.com. You’ll need to go to www.wordpress.org (not .com!!) to set that up. You can also get really slick templates (themes) free of charge to make the site more eye-catching here: WordPress Theme Viewer, WordPress Themes, and Top WordPress Themes.
Take tons and tons of pictures and if you can take a video of the home. (To give you an idea, here is my video of the Broadlands Reserve.) People want to SEE the home first. They like to picture themselves living in your gorgeous home before they ever get in the car to go and check it out.
Your next charge is to get folks to visit the website. List your home on Craigslist (this is huge), Trulia, Zillow and anywhere else you can think of.
Also, put it on the flyers that you have in the box on your yard sign. Make up flyers that you pass out throughout your neighborhood (I get tons of people who call or show up at an open house who say, “My friend/coworker/mother lives in this neighborhood and gave me a flyer…”), post at work, the local dry cleaner, restaurant, liquor store, and so on.
Ultimately, if you decide this is more work than you want to take on yourself, contact me. My fees are fair, competitive and well-worth it. I’ll purchase, set up, and maintain a website for you, take all pictures, conduct a video walking tour of your home, market it extensively through multiple resources, produce a targeted direct mail campaign, conduct monthly open house events, including a “broker open,” manage all negotiations, list your home on the MLS, place a sign in your yard and keep flyers in your box at all times, etc. I’m also easily accessible via email, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, and/or phone at all times! (Okay, almost all times, 3 a.m. probably isn’t such a great time…)
Call me at 303.887.1883 or email me at beth@bethskinner.com.
photo credit: David Plotzki
