The founder of 'For Sale By Owner.com' website sells his home... using a real estate agent
They’re known as “FSBOs” — properties that are For Sale By Owner. Every year, hundreds of thousands of properties are listed, not by real estate agents, but by the owners themselves.
Often, these are property holders who want to save the real estate agent’s fee.
These FSBOs are willing to do the work of researching a property’s correct price, staging it, advertising it in the right channels and to the right buyers, and showing, showing, showing.
But sometimes, FSBOs are just owners who have unrealistic expectations of how easy it is to sell a property — why, just list it on the Internet and the buyers will come, they theorize.
The founder of a website helping people to sell their own homes has found a buyer for his own apartment – with the help of a traditional real estate agent.
ForSaleByOwner.com creator Colby Sambrotto even paid the standard commission in the USA of 6% after selling his two-bedroom condo for $2.15 million. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr Sambrotto spent six months trying to sell the apartment in the trendy Chelsea neighbourhood through online listings and classified ads. Eventually the DIY home selling guru gave up and decided to turn the sale over to a professional.
Not only did broker Jesse Buckler set the price $150,000 higher than the original asking price, he went on to lure the elusive buyer Mr Sambrotto’s self-help methods had failed to attract.
The Journal said the 2,000-square-foot apartment at The Lion’s Head building near Sixth Avenue successfully sold through the real estate agent.
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