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In spite of the cons, we’ll help you navigate the challenges of FSBO if you’re committed to selling your Georgia house without agent assistance.
Steps to sell a house by owner
Next, let’s review the FSBO process step by step.
1. Prepare your house for sale
Whether you’re selling with an agent or FSBO, at a minimum you’ll want to get your Georgia home into respectable shape before any showings to increase your chances of receiving a fair price. Here are a few standard tasks to add to the list.
Indoors
These efforts will go a long way toward impressing buyers looking for a home in Georgia:
Dean says that making those small repairs around the home is even more important than actual staging. “Water leaks, mechanical issues, you need to make sure everything in the house is functioning,” she advises.
Newton adds, “For inside the home, I really think decluttering and depersonalizing is crucial. Go through every room and remove personal and unnecessary items. You need to look at the house from the perspective of a buyer.”
Outdoors
Some important curb appeal upgrades can include:
- Mow the lawn and pull weeds.
- Apply fresh mulch liberally.
- Upgrade your landscaping. Consider a new walkway, flowerbed, or shrubs.
- Add a fresh coat of exterior paint.
- Install a new garage door if yours is looking old or not working properly.
- If you’ve got a traditional wooden porch, make sure to repair any old or rotting wood, and seal against water issues. Georgia’s heat and humidity can do a number on wood porches or siding.
“Curb appeal is probably where you’re going to get the best return on your investment,” says Dean. “It helps the buyers feel that the home is well-cared for.” Both she and Newton say that when a buyer comes to a showing, it’s likely that they’ll be sitting outside for a bit while they wait for their agent or for the seller to come let them in the house. That first impression can affect the home’s potential sale, so putting your home’s best foot forward with an attractive exterior can be a big plus.
2. Do the homework necessary to set a competitive price
You’ve arrived at a critical moment in your FSBO process: setting a listing price. You don’t want to leave money on the table, yet you want to encourage activity on your listing.
Before listing a home, an agent usually conducts a comparative market analysis (CMA). This is a highly-detailed study of “comps” — similar homes nearby that have sold recently, are pending, on the market, or were previously listed but taken off the market. Some may have even been pulled off the market without a sale.
Dean says that pricing, primarily over-pricing, is one of the biggest mistakes she sees FSBO sellers make. “Usually people end up over-pricing,” she says. “If you put your house on the market and it’s too high, during those first 7-10 days it’s likely to drop to the bottom, marketwise, and stay there.”
Without an agent, you’ll miss out on the complexity of a full CMA and the know-how to interpret it.
However, with a little time and money, you can set a competitive price yourself.
Conduct your own “CMA Lite”
It’s time to roll up your sleeves and research:
Start with an online home value estimate
As a starting point, look at several online estimators for your home’s value. HomeLight’s Home Value Estimator aggregates publicly available data such as tax records and assessments, your home’s last sale price, and recent sales records for other properties in the same neighborhood.
We also add a new layer of information to our estimates using a short questionnaire. Tell us a few details about your Georgia home, such as:
- How much work does it need?
- What type of home is it (single-family, condo, townhouse, or other)?
- Roughly when was your house built?
- Are you planning to sell soon?
Using these insights, we’ll provide you with a preliminary estimate of home value in under two minutes.
Whether you use Zillow, Chase, Realtor, or Redfin to get a home value estimate, think of any online home price tool as a first step (not your only source of truth) — and recognize that the data used may be limited.
Narrowly filter your search for comps
When you’re ready to find comps, you can choose from sites like Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, or Realtor.
You’ll want to filter your searches to the area very near your house (within blocks if possible) and with similar characteristics. If you’re not finding any comps, expand your search map.
You’ll also want to filter results by details like:
- Listing status (look at recently sold, pending, and active)
- Number of bedrooms
- Number of bathrooms
- Square footage
- Home type (single-family, condo, etc.)
Beyond the above criteria, the more houses you find with floor plans and an age similar to yours, the better.
Use a site like Zillow to collect your data
As an example, let’s take a look at how to filter your search for comps on Zillow.
- Navigate to Zillow.
- Type in your address. If a pop-up with your home’s specs appears, close it with the “X” on the top right (or sometimes you must click “Back to search” on the top left).
- Filter by “sold.” Yellow dots should appear on the map surrounding your house, and you will see all the recently sold homes on the right.
- Now, filter by the number of bedrooms and bathrooms and check the box “Use exact match.”
- Next, filter by home type.
- Next, select the “More” box. Here, you can specify square footage, lot size, maximum HOA fee, and year built.
- While still in the “More” filter box, scroll down and select to view houses that sold in the last 30 days. If you find there are not many results in your area, try expanding to 90 days. However, the further back you go, the less relevant the comps.
- If necessary, click the plus or minus buttons to widen the search area.
- Once you’ve collected data for sold houses, revise or restart the search to view active and pending listings, as well.
Consider an appraisal
If you want to further reduce guesswork, some agents recommend paying an appraiser to provide a professional opinion of value for your home. An appraiser will combine recent property data, research of the surrounding market, and information collected from a walkthrough of your home to determine an appraised value. For a single-family home, an appraisal will likely cost $300 to $500 — well worth it to avoid possibly over- or underpricing your house by thousands.
“It can be helpful to bring someone in who has access to sales information that the seller might not have,” says Dean.
An appraisal isn’t always necessary or recommended, however, especially if you’re in a fluctuating market. “An appraiser is often looking at values from 6 – 8 months ago,” says Newton, “and those values may not be accurate for current market conditions.” Newton adds that if the appraisal comes back higher than the market will bear, a seller could end up with an inflated sense of their home’s value, and price it too high.
Make sense of the research
Compare your home’s features against the nearby comps you collected. Hopefully, the houses you studied give an indication of an appropriate price range for your home. From there, you can make dollar adjustments based on characteristics that add value (patios, curb appeal, an extra bedroom) versus detracting from it (a busy street, deferred maintenance, less square footage).
Consider the differences and similarities of comps with the appraised value of your home to choose a price that will encourage activity (too high, and it may seem out of reach to many buyers) but will also maximize your profit. For example, if your house doesn’t have a garage but the comps you’re using do, you’ll want to take that into consideration when setting a price.
Also, if you have a home with basement bedrooms, Newton notes that they are sometimes not considered “true” bedrooms in Georgia. “If a seller says a house has seven bedrooms, but three are in a finished basement, you may not really be able to call those bedrooms.” This is especially true if those downstairs rooms don’t have properly egressed windows, which means they cannot technically be referred to as bedrooms.
