Wanna Unload Your Property? Sell It Yourself

The NY Times tracked down New York-area homeowners doing some creative problem solving in this bearish market: they’re nixing the six percent brokers’ fee by selling their properties themselves… or trying to. Unusual methods of advertising help with the endeavor: not just Craigslist but good old Park Slope Parents, trolling the streets with handmade fliers and placing signs in windows, too. One Meatpacking district resident hopes to sell his studio for $525,000 and pick up a house in Midwood (still possible to get a house for that, you think?), but so far, no luck. A Brooklyn Heights couple did manage to sell their two-and-a-half-bedroom, one-bath co-op on Pierrepont Street in June, but not for the asking price of $799,000; they sold it for $737,500. “I don’t think a broker would have gotten full asking price, and they would have chopped off 6 percent,” the owner said. FSBO listings have increased dramatically in the building boom years, but that’s in part because there was just so much more inventory out there; experts say the method ain’t no cure for the downturn. Says Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel, “We are in an environment where the actual success rate in FSBOs has fallen off considerably.”
The Faces of FSBO [NY Times]
Photo by budderflyman.