I'm selling my place soon - let me know how the Zillow direct listing goes, I've been eyeing that and Opendoor as options.
It was easy enough to list for free as For Sale By Owner on Zillow. However be aware of a few quirks:
1. Your listing won't be live right away, Zillow takes a few days typically before they approve it
2. When someone searches for homes on Zillow, there are two tabs, "Agent Listings" and "Other Listings". Some buyers may not be aware of this feature, and FSBO listings get bumped to the "Other Listings" tab. If buyers don't know to click it, you'll miss out on potential customers
3. You aren't listed in the MLS, so you won't get exposure across multiple sites, again reducing your potential number of eyes and customers. There are some services out there you can use to get yourself listed on the MLS for a few hundred dollars, so there are routes to take without using a sellers agent to get on the MLS and get those eyeballs on your home
4. When you list without an agent, you will be fucking BOMARDED by Realtors looking to represent you. These motherfuckers are hungry as hell and desperate. We've had multiple ones offer to take 3% to cover both buyers and sellers agents (i.e. this is essentially half-price of the traditional 6% that used to be the norm before the sellers market hit).
They'll text you, call you, email you. They'll call and act like they have a buyer or have a cash offer, only to give you brochures and business cards trying to convince you they can get you more for your home than you can on your own.
FWIW I checked my own comps and arrived at 225K for my house, which is what I listed it at. My old employers son is a realtor and we recently had him run the comps and he said we were spot on as he arrived at 225-227K. There is a pending sale in our area for 315K that if it goes through could jump our own home to over 300K, which would be pretty sweet, but I'm not getting my hopes up yet.
5. You'll be hounded to do same-day showings almost every fucking day. It's positively exhausting. So you'll want to select a day and time each week to accommodate potential buyers. This allows you to control how much they invade your life so you aren't burned out with daily showings. Plus, when you have multiple parties checking out your house at the same time they know they've got competition, so it can help drive up your bids and create bidding wars.
We're doing a dedicated showing this Saturday afternoon, but if we don't get any offers we're happy with we'll consider working with my bosses son to get us listed on the MLS and help us get this thing done.
Can't remember if I mentioned it already, but we also put in a contingency that we want 60 days post-closing to relocate. This will give us enough time to find a property out of state and get it purchased without feeling overly rushed.
Since it's a sellers market, you get a ton of leeway that wasn't possible when we purchased 5 years ago.
