How You Can Sell Your House Online

Home prices have been steadily rising for a decade, but as of 2020 they’ve begun declining. If you intend to sell in the near future, it may be worth moving your plans forward. If you already intended to sell around this time, then you may be surprised to know just how many options there are to sell your house online. 

The days of posting a for-sale sign in your front yard and waiting weeks or months are long gone. You can use the internet to manage your own listing and market your home more easily than before. Additionally, there’s a tremendous market of investors who will buy a home in any condition in a matter of days. However, this speed and convenience can often come with the caveat of a lower profit on your end.

Why sell my house online?

Even if you hire an agent, it’s almost certain that they’ll sell your home online. This is because the internet affords faster, more affordable access to a larger audience than any homeowner could have reached in the past. If you intend to sell your home, you should embrace the tools available to you and find the widest set of potential buyers possible. 

Additionally, there are several unique sales opportunities that the internet has created. In addition to running your own for sale by owner listing, you can choose an iBuyer. Many real estate investment startups running off of an impressive amount of seed capital are buying homes as a business. Some fix and flip, which is to say that they renovate the home and then sell it at a tidy profit. Others hold onto properties in the long-term or rent them while looking to sell at an opportune moment when housing prices are high.

iBuyers often offer no-obligation proposals for your home without so much as seeing it,  enabling you to walk away with cash in hand in a matter of days. It’s easy to see what an iBuyer will give you, and you can submit inquiries to multiple iBuyers. From there, you can decide if it’s acceptable or if you should opt for an agent or self-managed sale instead.

Selling online with an agent

Selling your home with an agent is the most predictable, traditional choice for selling your home. Virtually all agents today will utilize various forms of online marketing, such as ads on Facebook and Zillow.

You pay the agent with a percentage-based share of the home’s value, so they have an interest in maximizing the sale value of your home. Their commission fee also includes the costs involved with marketing, which you might end up paying if you opt for a self-managed sale. Additionally, some realtors even offer to pay for the costs of staging the home.

While agents aren’t cheap, their services do have substantial value and you’ll need to replace them with your own time and labor if you opt-out of hiring one. Selling your house online with an agent is essentially the same experience that working with an agent has always been, with the same advantages and disadvantages. 

For sale by owner 

If you choose to sell your house on your own, then you’ll have to understand what an agent does so you can fill their shoes. For one thing, you’ll need to establish the basic value of your home. While an agent can do this quickly thanks to their preexisting real estate knowledge, you’ll need to do some preliminary research. 

Then, you’ll need to find a buyer who’s interested in your home and willing to pay an acceptable price. Depending on local demand, the exact size and type of property you’re selling, you might struggle to find someone interested in buying your home at the list price. In this case, you’ll need to learn the basics of marketing and how to advertise your home. This shouldn’t be extremely difficult, as there are many free online resources on effective advertising and SEO. Marketing makes up part of an agent’s fees, and you may have to absorb that cost.

Once you find a buyer, it’s likely that they’ll have an agent who’ll handle negotiations. In this case, you’ll be up against someone highly experienced in the art of negotiating. Thinking this stage through beforehand and coming up with a strategy you’ll stick to is a good plan. 

Selling your home online without any assistance is the most challenging way to go about selling a home. However, it can be extremely rewarding. If you do your work and manage to sell your home for what it’s worth, you may be able to save thousands of dollars for your troubles. 

Sell to an iBuyer

The modern era has given rise to many real estate investment companies that are buying homes purely as investment properties. If your house fulfills a certain set of criteria, you’ll find an interested iBuyer in hours or days. These criteria differ according to the exact company, but they prefer relatively modern houses of intermediate value.

While iBuyers are essentially investors, they’re usually better for sellers than traditional investors. This is because they’re backed by startup capital and utilize algorithms and modern business models to cut their costs, which they use to make more competitive offers. In some cases, an iBuyer may even end up charging smaller fees than an agent. This isn’t the norm, but it does speak to how competitive iBuying is becoming.

Pros and cons

5 Tips for selling your house online

1. Do your research

Eschewing an agent in favor of posting a for sale by owner listing can save thousands of dollars, but only if you’re able to sell for as much as an agent could have. To achieve this, it’s essential that you arm yourself with knowledge and understand:

• The value of your home based on size, location, etc.
• How to market your home, including SEO basics
• Techniques to increase home value
• Costs of any needed renovations

2. Stage your home

Whether you’re selling to an individual, you can increase the value of your home by staging it. When inviting an individual homebuyer to inspect the house, you should do everything you can to enhance the emotional and aesthetic appeal. Additionally, you should minimize personal items that will interfere with the prospective buyer imagining it as their home. Many realtors even bake bread in a home to fill the home with a rich, warm aroma. 

3. Add value

Adding value is similar to staging your home, except staging your home consists of aesthetic concerns while adding value requires more substantial changes. Converting a cellar or garage into a living space, investing in landscaping or a patio, and other substantial changes may add value beyond the involved costs. You’ll have to study the local housing market to understand what features are in demand, but adding value can net a tidy profit. 

4. Prepare emotionally

Separating from a home you’ve lived in for some time can be a stressful, emotional experience. If you’re selling your home on your own, then make sure you’ve separated yourself emotionally beforehand.

5. Consider an iBuyer

If iBuying interests you, then trying our iBuyer service may be an excellent decision for you. We take the most streamlined home selling process and make it even faster and simpler. Our tools will help you understand the worth of your home, find a suitable buyer, and walk away from your sale satisfied. 

6. What’s your home worth?

We offer you a home value estimator similar to what many iBuying companies use. You’ll plug some basic information into our website, at which point our data-fueled algorithms give an accurate estimation of your home’s value. You’ll also be able to directly find many potential buyers on our website, as well. 

If iBuying sounds like the right choice for you, explore the iBuyer blog to learn more about this innovative way to sell your home online.