For Sale By Owner

Two years ago we moved to a townhouse, now we need to sell our first home. My husband wants to do a for sell by owner. The house has been empty since May 5, on June 27 I finally got the house listed on the MLS. It has not been simple. Lucky for us, our daughter sold her home by owner a few years back and she kept track of the details in her blog - Laura's Blog.

First we had to get the house cleaned and ready to show. That took us several weeks. I was still working full time and we could only work on the weekends that we did not have other obligations. Every time we went back to the house I found more things that needed to be cleaned and put in order.

Then we needed to get pictures. I took several with a tablet, but they were not very good. Finally my daughter came by and helped. When I thought we finally had several good pictures, I sent them to a MLS For Sell By Owner service and learned that the, For Sell By Owner sign that I put in the yard could not be in the picture. Then, I sent the marketing information and learned that the words "family" and "children" are not allowed to be in the description. Every task took at least two attempts to accomplish, but most took more. Even securing the key box required a trip to the hardware store.

Now that the house is listed on the MLS we have been receiving one call after another. We have several offers and no clue as to how to respond. I would like to accept the first offer and get it done with, the husband wants to question every offer and figure out what scam the buyer or Realtor is trying to run . We would also like to sell the house to a new family not an investor. So far the calls are about 5 to 1, investor to actual home owner buyer. Do we have another housing market bubble forming? The entire experience is stressful and tiresome.

The MLS service we chose is MLS4owners.com. This is the same company my daughter used and they offer a good selection of services and have been very responsive to my emails. Hopefully the next update will have all of the details of accepting an offer and selling a house.