Sell your own home

We made a tough decision. Despite everyone telling us to keep our current house and use it to earn rental income, we decided to sell it in order to significantly reduce our home loan.

The house we wanted to sell was a three-bedroom, one-bathroom, brick construction, built in the 1980s. Located in a suburb north of Perth, it was not the most expensive house around; in fact, the house was valued in the price-range that was selling the quickest at the time. So it was a bit of a surprise when a real-estate agent valued it at a lower price than we expected. However, the biggest surprise was the fee the agent quoted to sell the house for us. The average time to sell  a property in the price-range in the area at the time (April 2013) was 39 days - that's from listing to 'under offer'.

The agent's fee quoted was $7,500. We thought that was more than a bit steep and indicative of another rip-off Perth service.

So we decided to sell the house ourselves. We conducted a lot of research in owner-sales, and chose to use forsalebyowner.com.au. A little reluctant to risk the fee ($699), without really knowing what we were doing, I started an online chat with one of their 24-hour support staff. I was truly surprised that, on a Sunday evening, Colin (one of the founders of the company), was available to chat online, give me all the risks, the positives, and the guidance, to place my property listing in their care.

After taking several photos of the property, and writing a description of its features, we paid the fee and logged on to the website to list our property. It was publicly listed on the most well-recognised real-estate websites (including realestate.com.au), by midday the following day. We had our first enquiry (SMS received to my mobile phone) by late Monday afternoon, and our first viewing on the Friday of the same week.

After purchasing a Sale of Contract form ($4.50) from our post office, we held an open day on the Saturday (just five days after listing) where 21 prospective buyers viewed the property. We received five offers, and accepted an offer at above the asking price - you should know that we listed the property at a higher price than the original real-estate agent wanted to list at.

We will honestly never again list our property with a real-estate agent, without first trying to sell it ourselves. The feedback we had from the prospective buyers, at the home open, included them being grateful that the actual home-owners were there to answer their questions about the house, without the real-estate agent spin being added. They also said that they felt the house was listed at a fairer price and they did not feel the price had been inflated to cover the real-estate agent's fees! In short, people were attracted to our property BECAUSE we had decided to sell it ourselves - we'd thought it might put people off!

We settled six weeks later - it was far easier than any previous experience I've had using real-estate agent.