Selling "Off Market" is an option, but make sure you're not selling your home short.

I was recently on a listing appointment for a house in San Mateo. After I was done with my presentation, the seller said to me, “One of my neighbors down the street just sold his house and it never hit the market. There wasn’t a sign or anything. What do you think of selling my home “Off Market”?

My answer was that “It depends”.

The first part of “It depends” is, what will selling “off market” mean to your family. Selling a home is hard on the homeowner, since the house has to be kept in showroom condition, all day and every day. You never know when a Realtor will call and want to show their buyer. Saturdays are big days for Buyer agents to take their best Buyers to see homes, so the Sellers have to find somewhere else to go for most of the afternoon. On Sundays, Sellers are asked to be gone from Noon until about 5Pm for the Open House. The house can get quite dirty after having 20 to 100 groups of people coming through during the Open House(Very common in our hot market).There are times when the Sellers return home after a showing, only to find that the Buyers agent and their Buyers left all of the doors unlocked and maybe let the cat get out.

Enough with the negatives of having your home listed on the Multiple Listing Service.

Part of how Wikipedia defines the MLS is “a facility for the orderly correlation and dissemination of listing information to better serve broker's clients, customers and the public”

Single Family Homes in San Mateo are selling like hot cakes. If they are in a good neighborhood, they are selling for over asking, with multiple offers.

If a property is sold “Off Market” you may avoid all of the frustrations that I listed above, but how does a seller know that they got Top Dollar for the property, especially in a Hot, Multiple Offer market?

Selling a home “Off Market” would be like an auction, where the doors are locked after the first bidder walks in. No one else is able to bid, so how do you determine what the true value of the item is?

If a Seller tells me that they want to sell “Off Market” I will definitely help them, but only after I explore the reasons behind their request.

For more information on "off market" sales, look here...

Off Market or Pocket Listing - What's the difference?

Why are "off market" properties so important in Los Altos and Los Altos Hills?