Pricing the For Sale By Owner Home

There are several ways to price your home. The good news is that they will cost you no money at all.

The first factor in pricing your home is deciding when you want to sell it. This is important for a couple of reasons. If you don't need to sell it immediately, you'll have more time to do the work. Also, if you have time, you will be able to do the additional work required to get your best price.

Now it's time to get to know the market. You can do this with online research, doing some personal legwork, and with the assistance of local Realtors.

When using the internet to determine prices, most For Sale By Owners will go to sites like www.zillow.com. This is not a good idea. Zillow values rarely are even close to the actual market price of your home. Do yourself a favor and do not go here! It would be much better for you to go to your county website. In the county website you can find the office of the local property appraiser. For example, in Sarasota County Florida, the County Appraiser has their own website. Do not go to the property tax website. The appraiser gets updated on all of the transactions from the county.

If you are aware of homes in your neighborhood that have sold in the last 12 months, find the place on your county's website to search for sales or solds. Then key in that address and make note of the price. Also, you can find the square footage of that house, which will be important as you price your house for sale. You will also find information as to when it was built, how many bathrooms, and how many bedrooms. Make notes on all this information. If this information is not on the appraiser site it will be on the tax collector site so find it there. Again, this is accurate information on actual sales from records delivered by title companies, escrow companies, and closing attorneys. This is much better than zillow or trulia.

This is very important to value. Remember, chances are very high your buyer will need a home loan to purchase your For Sale By Owner home. We'll talk about this later, but the bank's appraiser wil use this information in the formal appraisal of value they perform for your FSBO Buyer.