November 14, 2009 – Nashville, TN — As home prices reach bottom the housing crisis gets very personal for millions of upside-down home sellers. Not every seller can wait for prices to rise to recapture their lost equity. Life must go on. If you’re like 14% of upside-down sellers who aren’t willing to walk on the lender you’ll do what you have to do; cut the costs of selling your home and maximize your listing price as a do-it-yourself home seller or FSBO (for sale by owner).
FSBO can strike fear in the heart of the unimaginative. Agents worry about earning less than maximum commissions while sellers fret about the thought of advertising their home to attract buyers. But, these fears are often irrelavant once you examine the numbers.
One innovative Realtor from Tennessee is capturing this slice of the market to make lemonade from lemons by balancing the income-to-service standard. Instead of seeing the FSBO market as a competition, Susanne Flynn, a Nashville real estate broker, embraced the needs of thousands of home sellers in her markets and created a flat fee listing service, ResultsMLS. And, she’s attracting thousands of inquiries per month with her website marketing while offering hundreds of sellers a viable option that addresses their issues.
Flat fee real estate services can dramatically lower the costs sellers must pay to sell their home. Flynn, a self-proclaimed “Mompreneur” has added Lease-To-Own financing and advertising via the multiple listing service, (or MLS) and uses the same tools regular agents use to broadcast a property among the real estate community. Business is booming. Last year she sold $33 million in real estate while saving over $1 million in fees for her clients.
“Lease-To-Own financing can quadruple the buyer activity of a home so it’s the perfect match for FSBO”, says Chris Hottel, agent for Community Empower’s Lease-To-Own program. Adding it raises the productivity of whole process and the seller can often overcome the under-water gap while involving the agent community”.
