Should You Use A Real Estate Agent To Sell Your Boston Home?

When it comes to selling a Boston home, I think every home seller considers selling FSBO, or for-sale-by-owner, without the help of a Boston real estate agent. With inventory low and Boston homebuyers eager to buy, it seems like a golden opportunity to sell on your own and save money.

Boston.com reported that Boston is now the fifth most competitive home sales markets in the country, according to a recent Redfin study. This means that more than 56 percent of winning offers in Boston, MA were over the asking price!

Even so, as an agent who knows the Boston real estate market like the back of my hand, I can assure you that even in a seller’s market, you should use the assistance of an agent. Why? Statistics speak for themselves. Here, I’ve summed up information from an infographic, with stats gathered from the National Association of Realtors and Northwestern University.

• Selling FSBO takes 19 more days to sell, on average. Twenty percent of sellers end up relisting on MLS, which takes around 68 days longer to sell than realtor properties.
• Realtor properties sold for $41,000 more than FSBO listings in 2012. So, really, you will not be saving money by going it alone.
• The total number of property sales by FSBOs tumbled from 20 percent to 9 percent in the last decade, even with FSBO kits and the power of the internet readily available.
• A whopping 70 percent of FSBOs said they had significant difficulty selling. Mostly, sellers said they had difficulty with writing up contracts and understanding the legal paperwork involved with the sale. 
• Sellers also said pricing the home was difficult, knowing how to prepare/fix the home for a sale was difficult, and many other factors named in the infographic.

As you can see, many home sellers assumed that selling FSBO would save time and money, but in the end, they experienced more stress, their homes didn’t sell or they sold for less than what they could have sold for, and they took longer to sell.

If you’d like to sell your Boston home fast, and for a price that satisfies you, contact me! As your Boston real estate agent, I can take care of the complicated paperwork and legal matters, I can help you stage your home to sell, and we can come up with an asking price based on market statistics.

Patti Fine
Phone: 617-642-7585
Email: pf@pattifine.com
Patti Fine Real Estate
Greater Boston Area Homes
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