Introduction to How To Sell A House By Owner in Georgia

This is an introduction to how to sell a House ‘By Owner’ in Georgia.

Homeowners in Georgia pay hefty listing agent commissions and depending on the offer to buy their home, sellers pay the buyer’s agent commissions too. House sellers are choosing for-sale-by-owner (FSBO) transactions to avoid paying high commissions, but in many cases it may in fact cost them more money than what they think they’re saving. Everything comes down to how well a seller can execute the process of marketing the real estate and closing the transaction. Explore the pros and cons of selling a home FSBO in Georgia and continue reading the blog.

Can you replace a professional real estate agent?

Selling a house as is in Georgia on your own appears easy to many folks. Just pop a few photos on a website like Zillow and the buyers just come flooding in. But as it is often said, ‘the devil is in the details.’ Setting a correct list price, documenting what the law requires a home owner to disclose, understanding offer contracts or negotiating all the various terms of sale, and shepherding the transaction to the closing table are all skills one needs to sell real estate in Georgia. But how hard are those tasks? Let’s examine them in detail. How to sell a house by owner in Georgia begins NOW:

Step 1: Set Price for Your Georgia Home

It is a common adage among real estate professionals that the list price is 95% of what sells a house. And just like you couldn’t sell a Honda Civic for the same price that you’d expect to get for a brand new Ferrari, it’s important to set a realistic list price for your home. But how do you do that? Two crucial elements come into play: Market conditions and comparable sold homes.

Market Conditions

Market Conditions refer to how many buyers and sellers are transacting in any given sub-market. If you have more buyers than sellers, you’re in a buyers market; and if you have more homes for sale than interest buyers, you’re in a sellers market. And if the pool of buyers and available properties are roughly equal, then it follows you are in a balanced market.

Professional real estate agents use data gathered by their local multiple listing service to better determine market conditions, and these are the data points they research when preparing your listing presentation:

• Days On Market. This refers to how many days, on average, it takes for a home to go from listed to under contract. The longer the DOM, the more likely you are in a buyers market.
• Inventory. Roughly speaking, this refers to number of homes listed for sale, and is measured in terms of how many months it would take for that inventory to be sold. Naturally, longer months of inventory means more homes still looking for a buyer, which indicates a buyers market.
• Showings to Pending. This data point shows how many buyers view a home prior to one of them submitting an accepted offer for that home. In a buyers market where there are lots of homes to choose from, buyers will be pickier, and STP will trend upwards.
• Sales Price As A Percentage of List Price. This ratio shows on average if homes are selling above or below or right at their original list price, and can serve as an arrow pointing which way a market is trending; up, down or sideways.

There are other data points real estate agents can access to further narrow down market conditions, such as how many listings expire, are withdrawn, and/or become rental listings. Furthermore, it’s important to understand what makes your market yours:

• Schools. Because many buyers are families with school-age children, the quality of your neighborhood school system greatly affects the value of your home through how many buyers want to live there and take advantage of the schooling. A change as simple as an elementary school district can make hundreds of thousands of dollars in difference on your sales price, so you should only look at comparable sold homes that share the exact same elementary, middle and high school.
• ZIP Code. A good general rule of thumb is to always look at comparable sold homes in the same ZIP code as your home.
• Municipality. If your home is within a municipal (i.e. ‘city’) boundary, it is critical to only examine comparable properties within that same municipality.
• Subdivision. If your home is part of a subdivision, it is wise to keep to that sub-market, or similar subdivisions within the same ZIP code and municipality.

In addition to making sure they know your market and sub-market, any good listing agent will call other listing agents on competing properties to gauge buyer demand by how well those homes are showing and receiving offers, and you should do the same.

Comparable Sold Homes

Comparable sold homes is exactly what it sounds like: What are homes that are comparable to yours selling for in your sub-market? This gets back to the Honda versus Ferrari question. You use the success of other sellers to learn how buyers might value your home, and this is an artform of sorts in the professional real estate world, because sometimes your home is unique in ways that are not reflected in recently-sold homes, and vice versa.

It’s important to understand the features that buyers are using to evaluate your home so you can pick the comparable sold properties most similar to yours. Some features to make sure align with your own home include:

• Bedroom and Bathroom Count. This is the most obvious term, as who is going to pay the same for a 4-bed, 2-bath home that they’d pay for a 2-bed, 1-bath home? It’s important to realize that in order to be counted as a ‘bedroom,’ a room must have a door, an egress window, build-in closet, ceilings higher than 7’3″ and access to a full bathroom on the same floor. Many homes built in the 1990s have ‘bonus rooms’ that meet almost all of that criteria except for the closet, and you might be tempted to treat these as ‘bedrooms, but know that an appraiser might not count them that way.
• Livable Area. Also known as ‘square footage,’ this term can be tricky, as two homes might have similar square footage but different bed/bath counts, depending on the design. Understand that in the hierarchy of features, bed/bath count is more important than square footage. Furthermore, unfinished spaces like attics and basements do not count towards this number in the eyes of buyers or their appraisers. You should only count heated and cooled livable spaces in your square footage calculations, and this number can easily be found on your County tax accessor page.
• Lot Size and Condition. In addition to the size of the home, the size of the lot can make a world of difference to a buyer in terms of value. No one would pay the same for a home on a quarter acre of land that you’d pay for a home on a full acre. Furthermore, a steeply sloped and wooded lot is far less attractive to buyers than a level open lot. Make sure you are comparing not just your home, but the lot, too.
• Age of The Home. When your home was built tells buyers a lot about how well-built, well-insulated and how much investment in maintenance they can expect during their period of ownership. Naturally, the older the home, the less valuable, except in cases of historic significance, such as if your home is of a desireable design (e.g. mid-century modern).
• The Condition of The Home. Have you renovated the kitchen in the last five years? How about the bathrooms? Are the floors in good shape or could they use replacing? How old is the roof? The HVAC system? Some people maintain their homes, but never remodel, giving buyers the impression that the home is old and will require expensive remodeling work, even if it’s in good shape. Make sure you are comparing your home’s condition and style to similar properties. The difference between unrenovated homes and fully-renovated homes can equate to a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars in any given market.

With these data points and comparables in mind, you can begin to arrive at a price range for your home that correlates to how fast you want to sell your home. If you price towards the bottom of that range, you should sell very quickly, and if you price towards the top you may spend months on market. This is where market conditions come into play. If you determine that you are in a buyer’s market, then you need to price towards the bottom of the range, and vice versa in a sellers market. But do not deceive yourself.

It can be tempting to price a home based on an emotional ‘what you want for it’ versus what the market is telling you it should sell for. Sure, you may have lived in the house for decades, endowing the house with a value higher than the market may bear. Buyers will not share your emotional attachment to the home if priced outside of the market, they will not understand any arguments of value derived from such a position, and they may just determine you are too greedy to bother making the market-correct offer for your home, leaving you high and dry.

Generally, if you are selling For Sale By Owner in Georgia, you need to conduct all of that research yourself, through publicly available data provided by companies such as Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com. Knowing your market conditions is a critical step to understanding how to price your home.

Step 2: Prepare Your Home for Selling

A good way to sell your home at the higher end of the price range is to properly prepare it for sale. Just like when you go for a job interview and want to impress the employer, sprucing up your home can make you tens of thousands of dollars at the closing table.

This can be challenging if you live in the home while it is listed, or if you don’t have enough cash to invest in making it look it’s best. By looking at the comparable properties, you can better discern which investments and upgrades will fatten your bottom line. Here are a few suggestions:

• Staging. If buyers can imagine themselves living in the home, it’ll sell faster and for more money. Staging does three things: It makes an emotional connection with the buyer, makes the spaces look larger, and answers silent questions about furniture size and fit. Costing between $1800-$3500 for a three-month contract, staging is an investment that always pays a healthy return. Our company uses professional stagers such as HR Staging and Design when we list our flips.
• Clean and Organize: If you’re going to live in the home during the listing period, be sure to store and organize as much of your own stuff as possible. A cluttered home will spoil the buyers’ impression and make them feel like they’re walking in someone else’s home…And not theirs. Open and uncluttered living spaces help show a home much like staging does.
• Fix It Felix: Mildewed shower enclosures, peeling paint, scratched floors and stained carpets all sour buyers on your home. A coat of paint, fresh light bulbs, cut grass, clean blinds, and gleaming hardwood floors all give the buyer a sense of buying a well-loved home and not just another overpriced honey-do list.
• Inspect It First: Hiring a home inspection company to inspect your home for defects is a wise move because Buyers will do this once they go under contract, and you don’t want any surprises that could end your hopes of getting to the closing table or undermine your valuation of the home and put you in a poor negotiating position. An inspection typically costs $400-$700. Understand the condition of your home so you can fix or disclose the big-ticket items that could scare away potential buyers.
• Use A Professional Photographer. Why go to all the trouble of cleaning up your home if you’re not going to show it off? Poor photos are one of the leading reasons buyers will pass over a home. Don’t use your phone, call a real estate photographer. Even the best of them costs less than $250, and the attention those photos will draw will be worth the money.

Okay great! Your home is ready to list for sale. The next step is putting it out there for all the world to see.

Step 3: Get Buyer Eyes On Your Property

So you’ve got some photos, your home is looking great, and you know your list price. Now it’s time to put your horse in the race!

Most real estate agents list properties in state-sanctioned selling clearinghouses called the multiple listing service, or MLS. In Georgia, the MLS of record is the GAMLS, though in many neighborhoods of the Atlanta metro area, agents are also required to list in First MLS, or FMLS.

When an agent lists in either MLS, that listing auto-populates to websites like Zillow, Redfin and others, without an additional charge, reaching tens of thousands of buyers at the click of a button. Even though you do not need a real estate license to transact in real estate, the MLS services are only open to licensed real estate professionals.

To compete with their listings, you have a number of options:

• Flat-fee MLS Listing Provider: Companies such as Duffy Real Estate offer FSBO sellers access to the MLS through a flat-fee listing agreement. They conduct no marketing campaigns for you outside of simply listing the property on the MLS, carry no client representation, and you are still responsible for negotiating with buyers.
• Real Estate Marketplace Company: Think Zillow, Redfin, etc. These companies sell visibility for your home on their websites for a monthly fee. There are also FSBO-specific websites such as FSBO.com and ForSaleByOwner.com, which also offer a fee-based listing service for regular people.
• General Web Marketing Platforms. Companies such as Craigslist offer a cheap solution to getting eyes on your property.
• Social Media. Facebook marketplace is an option for marketing your home, as is Nextdoor, a neighborhood-specific social media app that offers advertising services for a fee.

In general, it’s hard to market your property to the masses without paying a fee to somebody, but getting lots of eyes on your property is the key to selling fast and for more.

Step 4: Organize Home Showings

So now you’re your own real estate agent, with a property on the market drawing phone calls from interested parties, many of whom are professional real estate agents and brokers. What now?

Now begins the work of showing your property! As a general rule, the easier it is to show, the faster you’ll get an offer for your home.

For this reason, it is smart to move out of a home prior to listing it for sale. If you are living in the home and only have a small part of each day for viewings, you can expect the process to take a lot longer. However, here are some tips to help you maximize viewings while living in the home:

• Set A Clear Schedule. A clean, consistent schedule means you can have your home cleaned up and looking tidy for every showing.
• Install A Lockbox. Going on vacation and want the showings to continue? Install a lockbox for agents to access while you’re away. Just be sure to never give the code to anyone who doesn’t have a real estate license (and make them prove it).
• Have Your Docs Handy. Make a list of repairs, upgrades and features to send to interested parties, bonus points if you have an inspection done and can show receipts for where you fixed problems found on the inspection.
• Buyers Agents Are Your Friends. So you saved money by not listing with an agent, but buyers agents also work to help sell the buyer on your home and shepherd the transaction to the closing table. Be sure to budget a commission for them, as incentivizing an agent to prioritize your listing is money well-spent, and they also help coordinate the contract and closing process, a valuable service as well.
• Learn the Law. Federal law prohibits anyone from discriminating based on race, sex, gender, ethnicity, veteran status family status and disability. Asking questions like, ‘Is your buyer okay living in a mostly-Jewish neighborhood?’ is a violation of the law and you could be referred to law enforcement in by an offended party. Conversely, the same could happen to you. So it’s important to know your rights.

Step 5: Review, Compare, and Negotiate Offers

If you are selling your Georgia house without the help of a realtor, follow some guidelines when you receive offers. This covers taking the offers, turning them down, or ignoring them. Consider each offer on its own merits and never turn down an offer.

So you’ve had a few showings, and you’ve got an offer in your hands. What now? There is a lot to unpack when reading over an offer, especially an offer sent by a professional real estate agent, but understanding the terms is critical to determining if the offer is right for you.

Here are some common terms and exhibits on a GAR form purchase and sale agreement:

• The Sales Price. Seems pretty cut-n-dry, but be aware that an unusually high sales price may be a smoke screen for other, less-attractive terms.
• Closing Date. The shorter the better, though you should contact the buyer’s lender and make sure the lender has good reasons to believe the buyer can perform.
• Due-diligence period. Also known as the inspection period, this is a blanket contingency that gives the buyer the right to back out of the contract with their earnest money for any reason. Normally, this is the period where the buyer inspects the property. The fewer days the better. DD longer than 7 days can indicate the buyer is not committed to buying the property, or that you are dealing with a wholesaler who is just trying to sell the contract to a third-party buyer and will back out of the contract if that buyer cannot be obtained.
• Closing Costs. Some buyers ask the seller to contribute some of their proceeds to the buyer’s side of the transaction, or spend money repairing things on the house. These are called closing costs, and for buyers with little spare cash, seller contributions to closing costs can help get a transaction to the closing table.
• Earnest Money. The higher this number, the greater the buyer commitment. A rule of thumb is to look for at least 1% of the offer price in earnest money. Many wholesalers will offer far less in case they need to walk away from the earnest money if their third-party buyer doesn’t perform.
• Earnest Money Holder. In the state of Georgia, earnest money should be held by either the closing attorney or a real estate broker, the buyers or your own. Never never never accept earnest money from the buyer, as this creates a potential for litigation if the transaction does not close and there is a dispute.
• Buyer-Agent Disclosures: If a real estate agent is representing themself, any corporate entity in which they hold shares, or a family member as the buyer, they must disclose that to you.
• Financing Contingency. This document lays out how long the Buyer has to get their purchase money loan approved by their lender, normally 2-4 weeks. It can also establish an appraisal contingency, meaning that if the home does not appraise for the contract price, the Buyer can exit the contract with their earnest money in hand.
• Lead-Based Paint Exhibit. For homes older than 1978, if the seller has any records or tests indicating the presence of lead-based paint in the home, the seller must disclose, but ONLY if such test results exist. Otherwise it is the Buyer’s duty to discover this and account for it in their offer.
• Commission Agreement. Since the lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors in 2024, all commissions are negotiable and sellers are not required to pay a buyer’s agent or their broker, unless agreed upon in writing. Enter the commission agreement form, where a buyers agent formally asks the seller to pay a commission to the buyer’s broker and agent. This is completely negotiable, and in many cases, a good idea, since it frees up cash the buyer can use to pay more for the home.
• Brokerage Agreement. Buyers agents working with you as the seller to get a transaction to the closing table must disclose to you the ways in which they are acting in the transaction. You are either their client or their customer, and this document, sometimes called a ‘Showing Unlisted Property Exhibit’ lays those roles out for both parties.

Step 6: Negotiating and Agency Relationships

Every term in a purchase and sale contract can be negotiated, and when selling your own by-owner, you will more than likely be negotiating with a real estate professional representing the buyer. When in negotiations, it is important to realize how the agent treats you and the buyer in terms of representation.

• Client: A client relationship gives you access to a real estate professional’s expertise in markets, marketing, sales and negotiation. When you sign a client brokerage agreement with an agent, you can ask questions such as ‘Am I listing this property for the right price?’

• Customer: A real estate professional, whether representing seller or buyer, can represent any party in the transaction as a ‘customer,’ meaning the agent has a duty to make sure all contracts are filled out according to state law, and questions regarding those contracts are answered. However, the agent may not give their opinion or expertise in any other capacity.

If you’re dealing with a buyers agent, they are most likely viewing you as a customer, and the buyer as their client. Understand that you are on your own in any negotiations, the agent cannot give you any tips, insider information, or other advantages that they CAN give to their client.

You can rely upon the buyers agent to explain contract terms, the closing process, or any other technical questions, but any legal questions they will more than likely refer to the closing attorney.

Step 7: The Closing Process

Once you and the buyer are past the due-diligence period and earnest money has been deposited, the closing attorney will begin executing the purchase and sale agreement terms, starting with reaching out to you and the buyer for personal information related to the transaction. This process involves many steps:

• Title Search. The closing attorney will hire a specialist investigator to research the chain of title and make sure that you have the right to sell the home. They will find any liens placed against the house, including the security deed if you have a loan outstanding on the property. They may ask you for a current loan statement in order to obtain the payoff from your lender.
• Tax Proration. The closing attorney will pro-rate the annual property taxes. If you haven’t paid them yet, you will be credited back your portion of that year’s taxes per the number of days you lived in the house.
• Loan Approval. While the attorney is working on title and liens, the buyer works with their lender to get the necessary loan approval to close the deal. This means the lender verifies what the buyer is claiming to be their income and debts.
• Closing. Once title has cleared and the loan is approved, the attorney creates a spreadsheet called a ‘settlement statement’ that clearly lays out the entire transaction, from sales price to net proceeds. The buyer deposits any funds necessary to close with the attorney, and both parties meet in the closing attorney’s office to transfer title from seller to buyer.
• Post-Closing. After closing, the attorney should wire the seller the proceeds (sales price minus loan payoff, commissions and closing costs) and record the executed documents with the County. Be sure to follow up with the attorney about a month after closing to make sure all of this was done.

Is Selling Your House By-Owner Worth It?

Selling a house by owner in Georgia is challenging, and statistically, sellers net less money for their properties when selling FSBO than with a real estate professional, even when considering real estate commissions.

Furthermore, the recent NAR settlement has made selling with a real estate agent possibly even less expensive, as the buyer is expected to pay more of their own agent’s commission, cutting a full 3% off the seller’s closing expenses in some cases.

The other option of course is to simply sell your house to a cash buyer like Light Box Invests. For houses in need of significant repairs just to be livable, houses with title problems, or houses owned by out-of-state landlords and heirs, a cash buyer offers an ultra-simplified transaction that saves the seller not just real estate commissions, but also closing costs, repair and cleanout costs, and time. Light Box Invests can close as soon as title clears, or about two weeks in most cases. Now THAT’S convenience.

Conclusion

So what is your reason for selling your home by-owner? It’s important to get crystal clear as to your reasons, and whether they justify the headaches and workload of marketing your property.

Homeowners in Georgia try to balance expenses against returns when selling their house, and selling by-owner seems like a good option, but everything depends on each homeowner’s specific situation. What’s yours? Do you need guidance? Obviously, if you’ve read this far you can tell that Light Box Invests is dedicated to providing the information YOU need to make the best decision possible for yourself and your situation. Give us a call today at 470-668-5008 and let’s chat about your property, your situation, and your bottom line.

-Stephen Jones, Author

Frequently Asked Questions