How we sold our home for sale by owner

I am certainly not offering any legal or professional advice here. I'm simply sharing what we did to sell our home for sale by owner in about one month's time:

Step 1: Know your limits: Determine how much you still owe on your home (contact who you have your loan through), how much you need to sell it for to get what you need out of it and how much you will need to pay for your share of the closing costs (a title company can get you this number for free). Also consider, how long are you willing to do for sale by owner before looking to use an agent. Know your absolute bottom number you'd be willing to sell your home for and be ready to hear/walk away from some very low-ball offers. You will also want to determine if you'll be willing to pay a finding agent any fee (we went with 1% but didn't end up having to use it because our buyer found us on their own.)

Step 2: Know what you're worth: We had real estate agents begging for the opportunity to do a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) on our home for FREE. They do this for free because if you get in the position that you decide you need an agent, they're hoping you'll go with them. This is nice because they check out your area and let you know how much they feel your home would sell for. This helps to give you a good idea of what to put your home on the market for. We had three agents do a CMA for us. (For the record, we ended up selling our home for about $6,000 more than they told us to market it for). 

Step 3: Market yourself: Get the word out as best as you can. We did the following: 1) sign in the yard 2) Craigslist (which is how our buyer found us) 3) KSL CLassifieds 4) Facebook and 5) Zillow. All of these methods were free. Be sure to take really nice/high quality pictures of your VERY clean and VERY staged home. Keep your home clean and staged while you show it (yep-that's rough with kids, but it only lasted 10 days for us).

Step 4: Have your documents ready: We had a real estate friend send us "Agreement to Purchase Real Estate Forms" so when someone was ready to make an offer, we just emailed them the forms, they filled them out and returned them to us with their Earnest Money. These forms can also be found online or purchased at an office supply store like Staples for about $9

Step 5: An acceptable offer: Once you've accepted an offer, you sign the contract and give a copy to the buyer and cash the Earnest Money check to make it official. Your buyer then takes their copy of the contract to their lender and the lender handles it from there until it's time to do the closing with a Title Company which will handle the final details. 

Step 6: Celebrate!!!