By Michael Kies

Due to the amount of information on the internet advocating that people sell their houses on their own, I have definitely noticed a rise in the practise. I would love your thoughts so please let me know what you think below. For instance, I just found an article titled:

[LINK] “How to sell your own house…”

So the article that I linked to above gives us some great hints as to where FSBO’s are hanging out online and what they are doing offline and this can be a great potential source of leads for us. The first stage of the article is about preparing your home for sale, and the second is about attracting buyers.

We are more concerned with stage 2 of this article today because it points us in the right direction to find the FSBO’s in our area. The fourth point states:

Market your home:

1. Staking a “For Sale By Owner” sign

2. Advertise online: Classified sites, local paper, your own social media

3. Put up fliers

4. Call bank managers and ask them to keep an ear out

5. Rely on word of mouth

This means that there are people listing their homes on sites like craigslist, trading post and gumtree and this can be a great source of listings for you if you know how to approach these people to help them get happily moved.

SCRIPT:

‘Is the reason that you are trying to sellyour property privately so thatyou can save on agents fees?’

‘So if I can show you a way that actuallycosts you nothing and we get themoney out of the buyer, you would be happyto use me as your agent?’

So why don’t I come and have a lookat the property, one day soon?’

Chances are they aren’t having a lot of luck online because I think it is safe to say that advertising on a classified site like gumtree or craigslist and promoting your home on your own personal social media sites will not cut it.

The vendor is really limiting their exposure to buyers, by promoting their home to their friends and 86% of people use online as their main tool to search for property to buy1, and whether we like it or not a majority of these people visit realestate.com.au or domain.com.au first.
The only price I am authorised toquote is the asking price.

This is great news for you! So you can come in and offer a solution to their lack of enquiry problem and their buyer negotiation problems and show them how they can get happily moved quickly.

Also on gumtree individual ads have information displayed like
– date listed
– date edited
– visitor count.

These are a great indicator of how successful the owner has been.

If the ad has been there for quite some time – it may have gone or been taken off the market – but it may also have had no response. The counter is a great indicator too. If the ad has been online for say 3 weeks and you visit it everyday for a week and the counter is only moving slowly chances are they have had a really small amount of enquiry making way for you to solve their problem and get the business. Use the script I shared with you.

I love these articles because it tells us what the FSBO’s in our area are thinking and helps us to overcome it. Use these examples as ways to find and approach FSBO’s to see if they would like some help in selling their homes. Also use these examples as ways to overcome objections by FSBO’s.

Thanks a lot for watching today. It is so important to know how to approach FSBO’s in this emerging online classified selling space. I would love to know if you have had any experiences with approaching online FSBO’s at all so leave a comment below and let me know or send me an email to michael@michaelkies.com.au.