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FSBO/flat fee sellers: Chat me up about selling a primary residence without a traditional 6% agent. (Or tell me why I should get one.)

Hey folks, appreciate any advice you can give about selling a home without the traditional "full service" agent channel, or alternatively, why I should get one.

Frankly, my bias is against paying 6%. I just want to get that out of the way upfront. I'm not 100% against paying a buyer's commission (or even a full service agent!) even though the obvious goal here is the maximum net proceeds. That really is the #1 goal here, everything else comes secondary.

Sales price: 200k+/- in the deep south. I'm not against going 199,900 just to hit the <200k filter if necessary. I'm a CPA and have looked at plenty of comps including on the same street so I believe this is fairly reasonable, even if I'm not a real estate expert.

Staging: we've watched HGTV. Clear out all the personal bullshit, deep clean and make everything look nice. From what I'm seeing, this is as good as staging gets at this price point despite all the REALTORS™ on this subreddit claiming that they go in and paint houses "for free" and shit like that.

Photos: OK, this is where a lot of you are gonna be like "come on this is too much". I am a semi-professional photographer, although my paid work is mostly in the past. I don't mean taking pictures of family friends for $99. I mean my photos have been featured in the regional newspaper, I've been on TV, and to this day, a photo I took 10 years ago is still featured on the front page of a local real estate agency's website. (Not in a slideshow - directly featured.) I have equipment and genuinely think I know what I'm doing here.

The actual "sales" (i.e. walkthrough, phone calls, etc) process: plan to leave that to the lady of the house. She has plenty of professional experience in that area. As far as the paperwork, probably get a local real estate lawyer. I believe that I have a decent enough grasp of marketing that I could generate the proper leads, even though I'm not sure about FSBO vs flat fee/discount agent and whether to say no agents vs. paying a commission. We are not the alleged delusional FSBOs from hell that seem to get brought up constantly on this subreddit. We're reasonable businesspeople who want to make a reasonable deal.

We're talking about, on the low end, somewhere around $5000 and on the high end, somewhere close to $12,000 in savings. For us, that is not insignificant and in our market and price range, I am not seeing what an agent can do for us to justify taking that much money off the top.

I'm not against hearing from real estate agents here, but again, I do have a bias. So I'd like to hear about the pros and cons of everything I've mentioned, so that I can try to make a more informed decision. Thank you for any information you can provide.

submitted by /u/TheRealTrailerSwift
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/RealEstate/comments/jlfbwf/fsboflat_fee_sellers_chat_me_up_about_selling_a/
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