Especially after the hot market of the past few years, you may be tempted to try selling your home on your own, or "FSBO."
But, unless you've gone through the process on your own before, there's a good chance you don't have a full picture of the various aspects of homeselling, and you may be setting yourself up to miss key details of the selling process.

Do You Know How to Stage Your Home?
Even if you pride yourself on your decorating skills, staging a home to sell is not the same as creating a space you enjoy living in. One of the critical aspects of setting up a home to sell for the best possible price is staging.  And while you can find all sorts of staging tips online, a professional home stager can come into your space and already know what choices will best suit your unique property and the local market.  They can guide you away from cosmetic changes that won't pay off, and toward the staging choices that will wow potential buyers.

Mainstreet REALTORS® have established relationships with local home stagers. If you hire a Mainstreet REALTOR®, they can recommend a stager to work with, and handle many of the details for you.

Do You Really Know What Your Home is Worth?
You can't just price your home based on the estimates of local homes that you find online. Those numbers simply don't tell you enough about each home's condition to know what goes into the prices. Recent and rapid changes in the market make comparing your home’s value to others even more difficult. Informed pricing is critical: a home priced too low may sell quickly but lead you to miss out on the profit you could have made, while a home priced too high may linger on the market for months.

To get an accurate price set for your home, hire a Mainstreet REALTOR® with expertise in your local market. They will know why local homes have sold at the price points they have, and can apply that knowledge to pricing your property.

Have You Considered How You Will Market Your Home?
Even in a seller's market, you don't just want to slap a sign up on your property and wait for people to wander by. Selling your home requires marketing, and you want to reach people outside your own circle. After all, more interested buyers will translate into a better sale price for you.

Local Mainstreet REALTORS® market homes as a matter of course, and will know where and how to market your home in order to reach buyers who will value your home's particular features.

Are you Prepared for the Legal Paperwork?
This may seem like a trivial thing at first, but the emotions you have wrapped up in your home are going to add a layer of stress to your FSBO plans. Not to mention that you'll also be dealing with finding your new home and preparing to move.

Hire a Mainstreet REALTOR® for an objective point of view on every aspect of homeselling, from the paint color most likely to entice buyers to the terms of your contract. Any seller is going to be influenced by emotion, it's totally natural. But your Mainstreet REALTOR® can work with you to guide you through these feelings and keep your sale on track despite them.

Convinced yet? If you see the value of having a Mainstreet REALTOR® by your side as a guide and advocate through the homeselling process, find a Mainstreet REALTOR® today.