Lake Martin, like any real estate market, will always have its share of people selling their waterfront property themselves - aka For Sale By Owner or FSBO (pr FIZZ-bo). And that's fine with me. I am not one of those realtors that looks down on FSBOs as idiots or realtor hating zealots. I think it is up to me as a real estate agent to prove to the FSBO prospect that I will save them time and make them money if I list and help sell their Lake Martin home or lot.
I talk to FSBOs all the time. What I try to do is help them by giving them the clear and un filtered truth about the Lake Martin market and how the market might react to their home. The decision to list or not to list is certainly up to them.
That being said, there will always be a segment of people that choose to sell their real estate themselves, without the help of an agent. So I figure I might as well be helpful in case the FSBO experiment doesn't go well, maybe they'll call me. They often do.
I read a great article for advice to FSBOs in today's Wall Street Journal. Click here to read it. It had a lot of helpful sales strategies for FSBOs.
I would add to the article these suggestions to anyone selling their waterfront property themselves:
John's Tips to any Lake Martin For Sale By Owner:
1. Get Your Own Website - Go to a domain seller like godaddy.com and buy your own website address. If your home's address is 123 Lake Street - buy www.123Lake.com or whatever is available. The shorter the better. I do this for all of my listings. Use this on your flyers and advertisements. If you advertise your home on something like fsbo.com, its website will be something incoherent like www.fsbo.com/e34h3449ir4827 - no buyer can remember that, especially one that has been at Chimney Rock drinking beer for 3 hours. Once you have bought your site through godaddy, go to the control panel and choose "domain forwarding" to point the site to the long one at fsbo dot com. That way anyone who types 123lake.com in their browser will be taken automatically to the fsbo site.
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