Mrs Muesli

In view of the two current threads concerning real estate commissions etc, I'd love to know how many of you, already living in Canada, have actually sold your house(s) yourselves.
Did you put a simple House For Sale sign on the front lawn, or did you use one of the websites already mentioned e.g. www.propertyguys.com or www.bytheowner.com
How did it work out?
Was it easy? Was it stressful?
How long was your house on the market before you sold it?
I'm really interested as it's going to be my next Big Decision.

Ruby Murray

Hiya Mrs Muesli,

Yes we sold our first home by this method in 2004. We purchased the FSBO DIY manual from Chapters which was $40 at that time. We then took a couple of good piccies (one of the lounge-thru-dining-kitchen and the other outside front). We have an advertising firm that has For Sale boards in both our major shopping malls and a website, and to advertise the house for a month it was about $120 including a stick-in-the-ground sign. To draw more attention to that advertising, we ran an ad in the Red Deer Advocate for 2 weeks. The legal fees on the sale were approximately $1,200. We held one open house and had our buyer right at the end of that month! Saying that, we sold that house before the massive boom that hit Alberta, so we actually LOST approx $5,000 - but at least we didn't have to pay realtor fees, plus we needed a very quick sale to get over to Ontario for OH's job.

If you want anymore info, just ask me ok.
Cheers,
Ruby

zmartin

We haven't sold by owner but we are just completing a sale from an owner without the benefit of a real estate agent and we can safely say that the owner has lost between $30 - 50k by not going through an agent and not watching the market closely enough. However that's to our benefit so we're not complaining!

Zoe M. x