Market Evaluation: You want to know how much your home is worth?
Easy, just go to your local Land Title Office, find out properties that have sold in your area (if you own a house) or sold in your building (if you own an apartment) that are similar to your own home, pay the land title office for the documents for each home that sold, about $12/home, have about 3 – 5 comparable solds and you’ll have some comparables to worth with.
Market Trends:
Is it a buyer’s market, seller’s market or balanced market?Once again, it’s relatively straight forward. You find out how many active listings there are in your building/neighborhood, find out how many sold last month, and then you can calculate the absorption ratio (rate at which homes are sold). You can find this information out through the Real Estate Board, Land Title Office, etc…
MLS: Great! Now you know the price range of your property, and the current market, you gotta put it on the MLS.
Pay some company that charges a super low flat fee (a few hundred dollars) to ONLY list your property on MLS. Oh, make sure you input all the correct information on there, like room dimensions, property dimensions, etc.. You can find property from the city’s GIS system online.
You can physically measure all of your room dimensions or hire a company to measure the rooms, about $0.10/sq ft and they give you a floor plan too. Make sure you take professional photos, either do it yourself with a DSLR or hire a company, about $100 – 200. If you want to do a video, you can shoot one, either by yourself or hire one for about $100 – $150. Generate a killer compelling description, put open house dates, etc…
So your costs for photography/videography/floor plan/mls = ~$1000 depending on how big your home is and what you choose to do.
Time and Cost = $1000 + 8 hours
Open Houses/Showings: Now, your home is on MLS, make sure you offer flexible showing times, many Real Estate Agents take their buyers on tours and if you can’t accommodate to the schedule, your home may be left out of the tour.
Doing Open Houses for your home regularly (Sat or Sun or both) is of course beneficial and you have to put up signs in the big streets around your home. Go buy some Open House signs at a local Sign company and have it designed well.
It’ll probably cost you about $50/sign and you should have about 4 – 6 signs in addition to the FOR SALE sign you buy from them too for about $50 – 75.
Time and Cost = $400.+ 2 – 4 hours/wk, x # of times/month you want Open Houses
Offers: You want to work with your lawyer to vet the offers and make sure the terms don’t put you at a disadvantage. Lawyer charges $100 – $200/hr, not sure how many hours you’ll need, depending on the depth of the offer, # of offers, etc…
Time and Cost = 3 – 10 hrs of Lawyer’s Time
Simple right? It’ll only cost you about $2000 out of your pocket + 20 – 60 hrs of work to do your due diligence and how many open houses and driving you do. You also need to know some real estate negotiation skills, talk to your lawyer to review addendums that the buyer’s agent might write, you also have to pay the buyer’s agent a commission which could range as well.
If you really want to sell your home on your own, I can give you the detailed steps to do it free of charge.
The bottom line, a Real Estate Agent does these things and more full time. If you want to know more of how a Real Estate Agent can help you, contact me.
Yvonne Yang 
Carlos Garcia 
