If you are currently looking for different ways of selling a house by owner in Ohio, you’d know that a real estate agent commission could really eat up your earnings from a home sale. So, it is only smart to look for the best ways of selling a house by owner in Ohio.
Some of the cheapest ways of selling a house include selling your house For Sale By Owner or FSBO, hiring a discount real estate broker who offers full service but for a reduced commission, utilizing a flat fee MLS listing service like Houzeo, etc. You can also sell your house fast for cash to cash companies without spending much cash. However, you won’t be able to attract top dollar from them.
Read on to know in detail about the different ways of selling a house by owner in Ohio competitively.
Affordable ways to sell a house by owner
Below are some of the most affordable ways of selling a house by owner in Ohio:
1. Selling your home FSBO
Selling your home FSBO is one of the cheapest ways of selling a house by owner as you could manage to save up to 6% of your home sale price in commission by selling FSBO. Also, if you are an FSBO seller, your marketing costs are close to a minimum.
You can post your home for sale by yourself online on any of the public search websites at zero to little cost. Furthermore, you can place a for sale sign in the front yard of your property. You can even talk about your willingness and readiness to sell your home FSBO to friends and family—the best way to sell a home FSBO. You can go a step ahead and share your home sale listing on your social media handle, and wait for your network to work for you.
If you are trying to save money by not hiring a professional photographer or getting a home appraiser on board, the amateur photos of your home won’t get you any near to finding good buyers. Trying to save a few bucks when selling a house by owner in Ohio is the classic example of being ‘penny wise, pound foolish.’
Selling your house by owner in Ohio is one of the cheapest options but most FSBO sellers either fail to sell the house or sell it for a lower price than what could have been possible to rake in with a flat fee MLS listing or choosing the services of a traditional real estate agent. So, selling a house by owner is not the cheapest for you overall since any commission savings you’ll make on the sale would get cut by the suboptimal home sale price.
Why is selling your home FSBO not the right choice?
Selling your home FSBO is not the right choice as FSBO properties are by definition owner properties and hence off the market. They are not listed on the MLS database or all the best real estate websites used by home buyer agents. Note that 90% of home deals are still made between a seller’s agent and a buyer’s agent as a vast majority of home buyers still take the services of a buyer’s agent.
The buyer’s agent searches for home listings on behalf of home buyers using the MLS as all the listings in the MLS are co-broked. Meaning by uploading a home listing onto the MLS, a seller’s agent by default contractually agrees to split her commission with the potential buyers’ agent.
Why do buyer’s agents use MLS to look for homes?
A buyer’s agent doesn’t have to fish anywhere else for a home but the MLS as they’ll find over 90% of the listings on the platform as most agents are MLS members. Thus, selling a home FSBO may be the cheapest way of selling a house by owner in Ohio, but is indeed not effective as by default you will miss out on exposing your house to a vast majority of buyers and attracting top dollar for your house.
In some high-priced markets such as New York City with powerful local search websites that list your home for a flat fee to list your home FSBO, you can effectively sell your home FSBO.
2. Selling your home using a flat fee MLS listing service
One of the best ways of selling your home is using a flat fee MLS listing service, which is also termed sometimes as ‘assisted FSBO’. While it is one of the cheapest ways to sell a house as is, a flat fee MLS service bears a fee. As the name suggests, you need to pay a flat fee to a company upfront to list your home on your local MLS and other top real estate websites. Remember that with flat fee MLS listings you need to offer a commission to the buyers’ agents. So if you sell your house to a represented buyer, you may owe the buyer agent a commission of up to 3%.
Also, you have to be careful when choosing the flat fee MLS service as many websites charge high prices and even go on to list your property on the wrong MLS. For example, if you are a home seller in NYC, you may get fooled into paying up to USD 1,000 for a flat fee MLS listing package that claims to list your property in all 50 states. The flat fee MLS website will claim to list your property in your local MLS, regardless of where you are in the United States. But unfortunately, there is no MLS in New York City, and the real estate brokers here are mostly members of REBNY, a private company that operates a database of brokers called REBNY RLS. So, the unsuspecting seller here might have paid USD 1,000 only to be listed on REBNY RLS or other broker databases that are irrelevant in NYC.
Watch out for flat fee MLS companies with names disrespectful to brokers. Flat fee MLS companies with names like ‘No Agents Allowed’ or ‘Brokers No More’ as these same companies offer a service that would allow you to offer a commission to the same buyer’s agents so that they can bring their buyer clients to you. A traditional agent would not be willing to cooperate with a company with a name that has the vision to eradicate traditional agents. Instead, you must hire a flat fee MLS company like Houzeo that encourages cooperation with traditional agents.
Another one of the cheapest ways to sell a house is selling it by hiring a discount broker. If you don’t have the time to stage and show your home, hiring a discount broker could be your best bet. You can hire discount brokers that are small operators, salaried agents, or national chains that sell your house fast for cash.
Final word
Thus, there are many options even when selling a house by owner in Ohio from putting a for sale sign to making a flat fee MLS listing. The commission-saving route is highly lucrative than taking up the services of a traditional real estate agent but you have to be on your toes to find the right person to do each of the jobs so that you can sell your home for what it’s worth even without taking the help of a dedicated agent.
