Nine Steps to Selling Your Home Checklist

Follow the steps listed below, do a little planning, and you can sell your own property.  You’ll be surprised at how straightforward it can be dealing directly with the buyer and how quickly sale agreements can be reached without the back and forth of agents!  Don’t be intimidated by all the info here.  We wanted to give you a lot of detail and information to work with! 

Step 1: Prepare home.

Take a critical look at your home from the perspective of the buyer. Make necessary repairs. Clean and organize your home, including the garage and yard. Cut the lawn, trim the hedges and do a little painting touch-up. Paint is an inexpensive way to transform a room (use light neutral colors). Pay special attention to curb appeal and your entryway.  Invest in a nice new large doormat to welcome buyers.  The impression to aim for is clean, fresh, bright, spacious, and well-maintained.  One successful FSBO seller recommends presenting your home like a fine hotel, everything clean and fresh with all surfaces cleared off.

Step 2: Determine a fair asking price.

• Check out similar homes for sale in your area and recent property sales.
• Check newspapers.
• Explore the web. Your county assessor may provide on-line data bases of property information on their websites. Find homes with similar square footage, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, garage, lot size, etc. 

Step 3: Take pictures.

7 photos are included in our basic package. We suggest taking 2 outdoor and five indoor photos. Use a digital (best) or 35mm camera. Store mementos and clutter away.  Make your home look as open, spacious, and bright as possible. Email or mail photos to us to feature with your listing. (We do not return photos.) For a $35 fee, we will come to your home and take digital pictures for you when we install your yard sign. 

Step 4: Determine a good location for a yard sign.

Place a stake to let us know where to place your sign. We will deliver and pick-up a handsome yard sign. Find a location for your sign that can be seen by cars driving by. Indicate this location on the Property Listing Form. Please contact the Utility Notification Center of Colorado, 1 800 922-1987 to determine if any buried electrical or gas lines are present in the selected location. This service can take several days, so call as soon possible. (We are not responsible for damage to lines; plumbing, electrical, gas, or any others.)

Step 5: Complete forms.

List your house with SoCo By Owner by filling out online registration forms or by printing out the form and sending in your information. Normally we will place your sign within 4 business days.

As the seller, you are also required to fill out several forms as part of the process of selling your house. You can download and print all necessary forms from our site once you are registered. The Seller’s Property Disclosure discloses any known defects of your property to the buyer. This form should be shown to the buyer upon viewing the property. A Lead Based Paint form must be filled out for homes built before 1978.

When filling out any legal documents it is recommended that an attorney review or complete the forms. Although many for-sale-by-owner sales are completed with only a title company, many sellers don’t realize that most real estate attorneys offer their services to “fsbo” sellers for a very reasonable flat rate.  If you choose to allow an attorney to handle your transaction, they can help with all aspects of the sale from negotiations to closing, thus leaving mainly just the marketing to you (and SoCo By Owner).

Step 6: Print brochures and Offer to Purchase Forms (for the buyer’s convenience).

As part of our service you will be able to print brochures to display and hand out to buyers during open house or appointments, and to place in brochure tubes. We have tubes that we will attach to your yard sign if requested.  Info tubes, directional corner signs, and open house signs can also be ordered when you fill out your listing registration form.  We charge our cost plus $2 for each of these items and deliver them with your yard sign.

Offer to purchase forms (Contract to Buy & Sell Real Estate---Residential form), are available for you to print out to fill out, or to present to perspective buyers, should they need one.  Once you have filled in as much of the information as you possibly can, present it to a title company.

Step 7: Show home.

Show your home by individual appointments and open house. Have brochures and completed forms (from step 5) attractively displayed on a table, ready to hand out to potential buyers. Be sure to answer all of the questions on the forms, and all those asked by potential buyers, honestly. Be helpful but not overly talkative. On the day of the appointment make sure your home is clean, fresh, bright and uncluttered.

You’ll be surprised how enjoyable an open house can actually be.  Set the stage with soft instrumental or classical music.  Fill the house with the fragrance of fresh-brewed coffee, or bread or cookies baking in the oven.

If you wish, you can make out index cards for each room, placed where they can be easily seen and containing key features that you wish to highlight about each room, such as its dimensions, type of windows, flooring, brand of ceiling fan, or any other item that you would like your buyer to appreciate. Answer questions, point out your favorite features about your home and neighborhood.  Remember; you can do this better than anyone else can!

A word about holding open house:  We have seen it noted in some for-sale-by-owner articles that holding “open house” may be more advantageous to real estate agents than it is to home sellers.  It is a way for agents to make contacts, to meet possible new clients, and/or to acquire more listings---and for the home seller it may yield results in only a very few cases.  However, having said that, it really is not difficult, and it certainly doesn’t hurt for people to be able to come in and see what you have to offer. (You may advertise your open house on the SoCo By Owner site.)

Step 8: Accept or counter the offer.

Once you receive an offer to purchase from the buyer, you may either accept the offer-to-purchase or counter the offer. To counter the offer due to price, terms, etc., a Counterproposal form is required. If you have chosen to work with an attorney, he/she will help you with this.  In many cases, especially when there are no agents involved, the seller and buyer may work out the terms of the contract together.  In this case, the counter offer, and/or the counter to the counter offer may be unnecessary.

Once an agreement has been reached you may want to collect a deposit (earnest money). This is the usual and customary practice and shows the buyer’s interest and deters them from backing out of the offer. The deposit can be any amount you agree upon, but may range from $500 to $3000, or 1% of the purchase price. The money may be held by the seller or in escrow. An escrow account can be opened through title companies, attorneys, banks, or an escrow service. (Typically, the earnest money and the contract will be taken to the title company.)

The buyer may include in the offer some contingencies such as home, termite, well and septic inspections, financing, appraisals, and others.

Step 9: Provide title insurance and close the sale.

Once an offer has been accepted you must provide evidence that the property is free and clear of any liens and encumbrances by purchasing title insurance through your local title insurance company. Obtaining title insurance may take a few weeks so you will want to do this as soon as possible.

The title company may hold your closing, or the buyer’s mortgage company, or it may be held in an attorney’s office.

An important word of caution!  Always have your spouse, a friend, or another present to help you whenever allowing strangers into your home.  Do not allow people to wander through your house unattended. One old scam is to have one person distract you while another rifles through your belongings in another room of the house. Take a little time to store valuables out of easy reach. Although rare, these things can and do happen, even to professional real estate agents

Congratulations on the sale of your property!