I started a company to do exactly what you're asking about. We're tweaking a few things but our last trial was met with really good results. 160 letters sent out, 10 pre-market homes responded and showed.

(I actually did this because I was looking for a home in 20191 as well)

Anonymous wrote:It would be great to avoid a realtor and competition from other buyers if possible, wouldn't it?

What's the best way to find someone who is preparing to sell, but hasn't yet listed...neighborhood listserv? asking on dcum?

We're looking in N Arlington, which I know is a hot area, but I see houses in the sales records all the time that were never listed on the market. How does one find these gems?

Since the obvious stuff was covered (sending letters, checking listservs, asking neighbors), I'll tell you about my own experience: My wife and I had the same issue - ready to buy with a specific area and home type in mind but stuck waiting due to lack of inventory. I ended up getting creative: 1) walked the neighborhoods and talked to neighbors; 2) researched tax records to see who might be interested in selling. These efforts were decently successful but extremely effort intensive, so I got the idea to build Knockity so that homeowners could search for buyers, especially pre-market.

We've had a very high level of success for pre-market homes for one of our users. We worked very closely with Hannah to send out her buyer profile to about 200 homes near a specific school. (Buyer profile: http://hannah.knockity.com). Building up a marketplace is hard and we knew that people weren't just going to start visiting our site randomly. We had to bring our website to the homeowners. We sent out letters and hung door tags to reach these (mostly older) homeowners and were surprised at the success rate! Hannah has seen 9+ homes directly from owners, pre-market. She may even be buying one of them.

From this effort we've learned even more and are in the middle of revamping our site to build something more sustainable and that is helpful to both the regular consumer as well as the real estate agents that support them. In the meanwhile, if you want any tips/insight from my personal experiences and observations, feel free to reach out.

Anonymous wrote:

Steve wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Who is offering 1%. I'd love to use them!

https://www.redfin.com/

http://www.take2realestate.com/sellersadvantage

Maybe if you ask:

http://www.i-agent.com/traditional-sale/the-selling-process.html

http://www.glasshousere.com/home-selling-rebate-process

Awesome. Thanks. I've used a very snooty firm in the past and they couldn't even remember to bring the keys to closing. I've concluded that there is no service at the high end, so why not just pay 1%.

You're welcome. I had terrible experiences with agents too. I got licensed so that I could help my friends and family and provide a steep discount.

Anonymous wrote:Who is offering 1%. I'd love to use them!

https://www.redfin.com/

http://www.take2realestate.com/sellersadvantage

Maybe if you ask:

http://www.i-agent.com/traditional-sale/the-selling-process.html

http://www.glasshousere.com/home-selling-rebate-process

Here's how to get on the MLS for free/cheap: http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/475296.page#7298461

Here are my FSBO tips (sorry, just a quick and dirty copy and paste job that stripped out a bunch of stuff)

Offer buyer agent commission: If you don’t offer a buyer agent commission, your house may be unethically boycotted by real estate agents. Unless your home is in a very hot area, you’re going to want to offer commission to the buyer agent. The norm in the DC area is 3% but 2.5% is becoming more and more common. Anything less than that and you risk a greater potential that buying agents will ignore your home.

Get a lockbox: This is where you will store an extra copy of your key so that real estate agents can access your home and show It to their clients when you are not home. You can purchase a lockbox for about $25.

Use the Centralized Showing Service (CSS): Control access to home showings through this service. When an agent wants to see your home, they will call the CSS for showing instructions. CSS will call/txt/email you for showing confirmation before allowing the agent to retrieve your lockbox access code and enter your home. They also keep track of which agents request a showing and allow the agents to leave feedback through the system as well.

Use a Google Voice number: If you’re trying to sell a home on your own, agents may try to harass you for your listing. Use Google Voice or a temporary, disposable number as an easy means to block them. Further, if you decide to take your home off the MLS at a later date, you will receive calls for weeks soliciting your home listing. Google Voice makes it easy to turn off/block/screen these calls.

Try to avoid using a “For Sale By Owner” sign: This is a red flag for real estate agents. Many are not aware that “For Sale By Owner” sellers may still offer commissions to buyer agents and they’ll avoid your house altogether. They’re not supposed to but they can steer clients away from your home by suggesting other homes to tour.

Have paperwork ready. From HOA disclosures to lead-based paint disclosures, having these forms ready will speed up the process. If you don’t know what’s required in your area, consult a real estate attorney/settlement company. Or contact us and we’ll tell you where to find one.

Get your poker face ready: When asked, don’t reveal your personal circumstances including why you’re moving, when you want to move, and how little you’ll take for your home. If you don’t have an offer in writing, then nothing matters. And anything you say can be used to weaken your position that will result in a lower offer. Agents may ask if you have any offers. If you are expecting any, simply saying, “We are expecting X offers” may motivate their buyers
to make a stronger offer than they would have otherwise. You never have to reveal any details about pre-existing offers.

Be prepared: Real estate agents and buyers consider the “For Sale By Owner” seller an easy target for lowballing. Remember #2: “Know your worth.” If you’ve taken the right steps outlined above and your house shines above the competition, remember that there’s another side to the equation. You may want to sell, but buyers also want to buy. A $10,000 lowball offer is a lot to you, but it may only be a difference of about $50 a month to the buyer.

Don’t take it personally: You want to sell your home at a high price, and buyers want to buy a home at a low price. At the end of the day, buyers just want to find the right home, and if your house is it, then the money will follow.

You don't have to respond right away: 24 hrs is a good response window for a final decision or counter-offer. Even 48 hours may be acceptable. You can use this time to field other offers and improve your bargaining position among the other offers.

Anonymous wrote:

Steve wrote:It's allowed, they just keep both sides of the commission. You should be able to find a buyer agent who will give you about 2% back on your purchase. They'll also do far more than the builder to make sure you're treated fairly.

The person claimed he was just the real estate agent but then when I looked him up he was the one that actually pulled the permits for building.

We negotiated a price and he said that this price was only valid if I used him and not my own agent.

He also said they wouldn't accept any contingencies and if they did it would be a kick out contract.

Tell them you have a signed buyer representation agreement. Unless you already told them that you're not working with an agent...then they might try to bully you around...

Have you considered:

Use a flat fee agent to list your home on the MLS ($300: $100 for listing + $200 for photos). Offer 4.5% buyer agent commission. You'll find that some buyer agents will work a lot harder to sell your home.

It's allowed, they just keep both sides of the commission. You should be able to find a buyer agent who will give you about 2% back on your purchase. They'll also do far more than the builder to make sure you're treated fairly.

Anonymous wrote:

Steve wrote:It's basically illegal. If you read between the lines and learn the industry lingo you can get another feel for the property. That's why we prefer when owners provide their own insightful information and aren't limited to a few hundred characters.

Descriptions are limited to a few hundred characters. If you write too much in a description field, you get a dotnet exception when you go to update. Might want to give people a little more warning besides a page full of computer code.

Thanks so much! We had the maxlen set to 4000 when the db was set to 2000. I just fixed it.

Here are some. That reminds me, I have to unghost the fields when users aren't logged in:

Your agent might give you a checklist. Here's the first thing I found via Google: https://inthenation.nationwide.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/FinalWalkThroughChecklist-4_27-1.pdf

It's basically illegal. If you read between the lines and learn the industry lingo you can get another feel for the property. That's why we prefer when owners provide their own insightful information and aren't limited to a few hundred characters.

Anonymous wrote:

Steve wrote:

Funny thing is. We've already done all the legwork for the OP. We've got 9+ pre-market homes in Burke around Terra Centre Elem School based on outreach we did for one of our users. The reason you can't see homes listed on our site is because owners search for buyers and get alerts when new buyers pop up. They can then pre screen them before spending time on showings. We thought owners would appreciate this amount of privacy and control.

Not buying this as helpful. OP, you need to find things like homes with the original buyers in the Burke subdivisions built in the 1960s-1980s. These are now elderly folks ready to move on in life. And they are not likely to being the social networking tool du jour.

Why not? We did exactly as you suggested and it worked. What you might not know is that we sent physical letters and hung door tags to reach the majority of owners who aren't paying attention to our social media ads. Only a couple of people preferred to call the phone number rather than signing up to contact the buyer directly.

Anonymous wrote:Since you are focused, have thought about being pro-active and approaching likely sellers? This approach is fraught, but if you can save someone the work of prepping a home for market and cut out the middleman (agent), those savings, maybe 10 or even 15% of the purchase price, can be split between the two of you. Not saying it's easy, but might work out if you are willing to do your homework.

Funny thing is. We've already done all the legwork for the OP. We've got 9+ pre-market homes in Burke around Terra Centre Elem School based on outreach we did for one of our users. The reason you can't see homes listed on our site is because owners search for buyers and get alerts when new buyers pop up. They can then pre screen them before spending time on showings. We thought owners would appreciate this amount of privacy and control.

Anonymous wrote:Thanks everyone. If we bought now, we'd only have enough to put down maybe 70k? And from what I can tell, that would mean financing an amount that would leave us with a monthly payment about 900 more than what we pay now and we just don't have that much room in our budget to make that amount appear in our monthly finances.

Yes, we could stay in our townhome. But we'd like more space, a yard, a garage, etc. Obviously if we can't ever do it financially then we won't. But I'd like to try to find a way.

MIL is gifting us some money this year and she's made some noise about gifting us more next year. I'm hoping that helps as bit. If she gifts us the money for two years, it'd be tight but we could stretch to buy. If she gifted it to us three times which puts us right at the two year from now mark that I was talking about buying, it'd probably allow us to do it without stretching too terribly much but that's only IF the prices don't continue to skyrocket.

Honestly, I think our best bet is waiting until the end of the buying season and trying to snag one of the homes that's languishing on the market. Of course that gives us a dilemma of trying to figure out when to sell our townhouse.

My plan right now is to continue to save and to meet with a realtor and mortgage broker early next year to get a firmer grasp on numbers...what we could qualify for, how much we could sell our house for, what kind of repairs/updates we need to do, etc and then get going with making things happen.

Thanks for all the input. Aside from the tangents about child support, it's been helpful.

You think you'll get $50k+ equity out of your townhouse + savings in 2 years?? Let's assume you have the $70k now in both equity and savings:

+$70k current equity and savings
+ $56k gift tax exclusion (MIL+FIL to each of you)
+ $7k (2% agent rebate on the sale of your th)
+ $12k (2% agent rebate on the purchase of your sfh)
=$145k

You have enough for your $120k down payment and closing costs right now.