Buying and Selling a Home in Oregon For Sale By Owner

Wednesday, 19 October 2005 11:02 |

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using forms he got from a realtor

4. I had an inspector come out to the house to check it over.

5. I Had a pest specialist come out as the inspector found previous pest (termite) issues that are suppose to have been fixed but we want to validate. The pest specialist said no issue other than some carpenter ants on a small little attached water heater cover and some mice that are prevelant this year through out all of Oregon. $500 to clear up all of that. I'll set some traps myself for the mice and some poison for the carpenter ants. That should do it.

6. Close on the house after the sale of ours and move in.

How we are selling our home:

1. We got comparable closing prices and listing prices for houses near and in our neighborhood and set our price. In our case houses had closed a month or more before and none that were our same house in our neighborhood. Prices went up but the sellers asking price went way up. We put ourself above the closing on the slightly smaller houses as we have a very desirable lot in the neighborhood and we have done great upgrades.

2. My wife went to the store and for about $30 we got a sign and listed on Owners.com. Home depot, Fred Meyer, Lowe's all sell these home seller kits. The signs are kinda cheesy from those places (yes we have the cheesy sign.)

3. My wife also lists us on Portland.Craigslist.org under the real estate section and we have done every free for sale by owner site that we can find. We listed as "Realtors welcome" letting buyers realtors know that we will pay up to 2.7% to them (but still saving the sellers commission about 3-4% savings but up to 7% total if you had no buyers realtor) If you don't list "Realtors Welcome" the interest level in your house will be really low as so many buyers have realtors. If they don't bring in a buyer's realtor you can get all of the paper work from a for sale by owner store. I also believe you can get more pro looking sign's there. Here's the address:

For Sale by Owner, Owners and Builders Magazine (you can find the magazine they put out at Fred Meyer or other local stores)
8314 SW Nimbus Beaverton, OR (Corner of Hall and Nimbus) 503 523-4700

4. Others recommended advertising in the paper, which costs around $200. I did that but found more realtors call me trying to represent me than actual interested buyers. Hit and miss it appears as a person I know sold through it, we also had some interest that might have worked out but we had a decent offer by then.

5. If you want even more interest in your house or you want to be able to ask closer to others asking in your neighborhood use the agent I listed below. He is a real nice guy and charges a flat fee of $400 which gets you in the local MLS (multiple listing service) which all of the realtors use to find other realtors property. That $400 also gets you the professional looking wood post sign and a lockbox so you can give the code to the buyers realtors and they can let themselves in. It lists Craig Latourette's agency, so as far as anyone is concerned it's listed with a realtor. What you aren't getting is Craig won't show your house or fill out any paper work for you (but don't worry the buyers realtor does that stuff for you most of the time.) He will give you the paper work though and tell you how you should fill it out and give you recommendations on fliers. A little note with the local MLS is it's not the same as being in Realtor.com. That is a national listing of real estate that lots of realtors use but many use the local MLS. Thanks Blake Wellington for this contact. BTW there are services that will do the same thing on the internet as Craig does, they are all as expensive or more and this guy is local and will answer questions if you have them.

LATOURETTE CRAIG REAL ESTATE
(503) 977-0608

I ended up using Craig to drive up interest. Well worth the $400. We were showing the house 3-4 times/day in the first 5 days. The bad part is we had one of those lock boxes. The rude realtors will call and if you aren't home (they only call 15mins-30mins ahead sometimes) they just key themselves in. Luckily my wife always kept the house super clean and picked up but it's hard to do that with a 20 month old and have it perfect 16 hours out of the day (the rest you sleep.)

6. Next a buyers real estate agent in our case wrote us an offer, we chose to counter. Either they will counter again or accept or reject our offer. If they counter with an unacceptable offer or they reject we will be back in the advertising mode. For those of you keeping track this offer came through our portland.craigslist.org ad originally and then the guy looked at it again through his realtor once it was listed. Him bringing in a realtor cost us 2.7% of the sale ($6615 in our case.) I made him pay 5k more than I would have taken if he would have came without the realtor. I wanted him stuck with most of the expense.

7. Once we reached a mutually agreed offer is reached an escrow account is opened with a title company for the earnest money. We let the buyer have preference on the title company. Note: In the future I would insist on a title company for both the purchase and the selling of my home. If you can get the same one, you might be able to close on the house you buy on the same day you sell otherwise there can be an extra day.

8. The Inspection came next. Our house is in great condition so alls they found was a little flaking paint and some seperated caulking and other minor items. The buyer became nit picky and tried to get us to hire contractors to fix every little thing. I refused, ultimately I paid $375 of his closing to make him go away.

9. The buyers realtor will send out an appraiser to look at our house.

10. Close. In our case our buyer would not rent back to us. This is creating an issue as we need time to move and we can't pay for the new house till we have the money from the old. Common issue for people buying and selling. We were not able to rent back from our seller and it caused friction in the transaction as well so I ended up letting him rent back for nearly a week from me, and we lived at my In-laws during the interim.