Top 10 ways NOT to be the next sold FSBO in Phoenix

This post is inspired by my recent unsuccessful attempts to contact a FSBO seller in a neighborhood for which I have a buyer actively looking for a home.  The only contact method I have is the phone number on the for sale by owner sign in the front yard, which I called numerous times, but never received a return call.  Apparently, this home seller doesn’t actually want to sell the home.

With that as a backdrop, I thought I’d present further ways that someone that is trying to sell their home by owner, can surely fail.

1. Don’t tell anyone the home is for sale.  This is the absolute best way to ensure you don’t sell your home.  If no one knows it is for sale, then you are very unlikely to get an offer.  You still might, but it’s far less likely.
2. Don’t secure your yard sign properly, so that any hint of wind blows the sign into your neighbors yard.
3. Don’t put your cell phone number on your yard sign.  It’s best to put your home phone number on your sign.  After all, you don’t want to be bothered everywhere you go with calls asking the price and size of the home, along with when they might come see it.  You’ll get to that call eventually when you get home from work, and that potential buyer will gladly wait a few hours to get a call back.
4. Don’t return calls left on your home answering machine.  If someone does call while you are at work, or the grocery store, or playing golf, or any of the other reasons why you might not be at home, if you don’t want to sell your home, don’t return those calls.  Just click delete.  That’ll teach that potential buyer to try to call you when you aren’t home.
5. Don’t ever have an open house.  It is well chronicled that open houses rarely, if ever, sell a home.  Heck, I’ve only sold 2 homes via open house, and I’m a professional doing this full time for a living.  If you have an open house, someone might come through the home, and maybe, just maybe, that person may actually like it enough to want to buy it.  Avoid that hassle, and don’t ever have an open house.
6. Don’t list your home on any web sites, anywhere.  It’s way too obvious to list your home on fsbo.com or craigslist.org, as everyone will be looking there, particularly since they can’t get a hold of you on the phone.  So resist the urge, and just don’t do it.
7. Don’t list your home for sale in the newspaper.  Actually, does the newspaper even have a real estate section any more?  If they do, no one is reading it.
8. Don’t have fliers out front of the home in a box.  Everyone knows that fliers just get taken by all the kids in the neighborhood, or stolen by competing agents with a listing down the street (I’ve actually seen this happen to my fliers), which just wastes paper.  Plus, if you tell people too much about your home, like the size and price along with quality photos of the interior, someone might get interested and begin to take desperate measures to make you an offer.
9. Whatever you do, don’t make a single property web site.  Single property web sites are far too Google friendly, particularly for the address of the home.  Your address is likely to rank even higher on a single property web site than on Zillow.com, and you definitely don’t want to draw any undo attention to the home for any of those pesky internet searchers.
10. Don’t list your home with a REALTOR.  This one is almost as obvious as #1.  Naturally, if you list your home for sale with a REALTOR, then it’s no longer a FSBO.  And heck, that REALTOR is likely to do all of those nasty things above that you aren’t supposed to do, don’t want to do, or don’t have time to do.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to the blog