As a seller, you’d love to have more control in selling your own home, yet use the professional services of an agent when necessary. And of course, there’s the possible financial savings involved in handling more of the process yourself. While it sounds enticing, the biggest challenge may be figuring out which services you can handle on your own as well as which ones you’ll need help with.

In Part I of this article, we suggested that the seller first decide what s/he feels comfortable tackling in the selling process. This will be based on your previous home selling experience as well as business and negotiating capabilities gleaned from your educational background or practical application in the business world. How can you best determine what you can handle? By not only focusing on the tasks you have the most control over (like holding an open house) but by further breaking down the selling tasks/duties into individual pieces and evaluating each. In most cases, there will be six definite components to selling the house:

Prepare the house for the market

1. Gather information about the property/price the property 2. Market the property; Locate/pre-approve the buyer 3. Write/Negotiate the purchase agreement; Troubleshoot/close the transaction

After analyzing what’s involved in each of the six sections, you could not only determine where roadblocks might lie but where your lack of experience/expertise alone might require working with a professional.

For example, by the time you reach component #3 (making sure the buyer is pre-approved) you could be best advised to make sure you’re not confusing pre-qualified with pre-approved, that the buyer does in fact have a letter/certificate from the lender stating pre-approved status as well as interpreting contingencies of that pre-approval (like a satisfactory appraisal).

Then there’s component #5 (writing/negotiating the offer) where things can really get sticky. Since the buyer typically makes the initial offer to the seller, you may not have to know what information goes into which slot on the purchase agreement. But before you agree to the terms and conditions of that contract, counsel is definitely in order from a knowledgeable consultant/agent or a real estate attorney. It’s important to note that the closer you progress to the end of the sale (components #4-#6) the more you’ll have invested in reaching a successful close increasing the need for and the value of a professional to get you there!

Even if all six components don’t appear problematic to you as a seller, you may want to double check by doing one or more of the following:

1. Ask a real estate agent to outline everything he/she would do and provide for you in one or more of the steps. If several of the pertinent tasks/activities you’re incapable of performing are essential to navigating to a successful close, you’d better not attempt to go it alone;

3. Obtain a checklist from a title company showing the various checkpoints in the sale that occur from the time the buyer is found until closing and how they are handled. As previously indicated, these critical final components are not only the ones requiring the highest level of troubleshooting and expertise, they’re also the ones where the sale is most likely to collapse.

Find a home seller’s book or other resource and take one or more of the should-you-sell-your-own-home type quizzes. Since many break down the sale into components similar to our six and then apply mini-quizzes to test your ability for handling each component, this is a great way to get a preview of where you may need help once you’re headlong into the process.

5. In our next installment of this article, we’ll cover how to propose and negotiate a fair price with the consultant/agent for the services you need handled from the professional.

Published: October 20, 2000

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Julie Garton-Good, DREI “The Frugal HomeOwner™” As a syndicated newspaper columnist, author and international speaker, Julie Garton-Good DREI, C-CREC™, is called “America’s Home Affordability Expert”, addressing more than 25,000 persons annually on topics of real estate industry trends and home affordability. She is the author of five real estate books and is the sole two-time recipient of the international "Real Estate Educator of the Year" award from the Real Estate Educators Association. In 1997, The National Association of Realtors® nominated Julie as one of the fifty most influential people in the real estate industry. She shared the list with only three other women.