Top 5 Reasons Naples FL Homeowners Should Avoid Listing As For Sale By Owner

There are Top 10 Lists aplenty that detail just why any Naples homeowner should think twice before planting one of those For Sale by Owner signs in their front yard. One of them, is that when you try to sell your home all by yourself, the sheer amount of time you’ll need to devote to mastering processes that are already fully handled by full-time real estate professionals, is a true waste of time, and it’s one wheel that doesn’t need reinventing.

If you are among those considering how you will sell your Naples property, and since your time is very important, let’s start saving it now by cutting those top 10 lists down to the Top 5 Reasons to Avoid FSBOs:

1. You’re involved. It may sound like a good idea to be your own salesperson since you are the most intimately acquainted with the product—your home—but logic rules against it if for no better reason that buyers will be automatically skeptical of your impartiality. Why? Because you aren’t! You also don’t get the benefit of a professionally trained set of eyes helping prepare your property to appeal to today’s buyers, nor the benefit of honest feedback that buyers won’t share with a FSBO seller.
2. Legal peril. Throughout this year’s political debate, a frequent refrain from candidates (both local and national) has been the need to cut down on over-regulation. Without getting into those weeds, it’s certainly the case that federal and state laws require a number of very specific disclosures. If you aren’t a real estate attorney, that lack of familiarity could make a FSBO sale an open door to after-sale litigation. When that happens, there goes any commission dollars saved (and possibly a lot more!).
3. Expense. That’s right, one of the Top 5 Reasons to Avoid FSBOs is that a FSBO can actually amount to an extravagance. It’s logical, because most buyers take one look at your asking price, mentally subtract the commission, and proceed from there (wouldn’t you?). The most recent studies bear out the bottom line: only 8% of successful sales were made via FSBO, and on average, they sold for 15% less than the agent-assisted sales.
4. Marketing Oomph. As Real Estate Professionals, we market Naples homes all year long, 24/7. As a result, we know which marketing approaches are currently bringing in results, and which are wasting time and money. We also have open channels with the media companies we deal with regularly—an advantage that FSBO sellers can’t hope to match.
5. Expert Opinion. The open secret is that those who know the most about how to get the best results from a home sale tend to rely on expert help. A good example came in 2014, when Al Bennati, the CEO of the “BuyOwner” dot-com (“the strongest For Sale by Owner marketplace”) decided to sell his home, and he listed it with a REALTOR^®.

There! Time saved already—who needed a Top 10 list when you have these? We bet you agree: these “Top 5 Reasons to Avoid FSBOs” are more than sufficient reasons to avoid the FSBO route…and to give us a call instead!

Angela Graziano & Scott Twait, P.A.
REALTORS^®
The Gulf Coast Group
239.771.3900

Naples Area Home Market Values Seldom Equal their Replacement Values

“Ideal” is a Shangri-La kind of a word. It’s not just because of its feel-good, pie-in-the-sky definition (“a standard of perfection or excellence”)—but because contained right there inside the word itself is a tacit admission. It’s only an idea—not something necessarily connected to concrete reality.

Naples residents don’t come across “ideal” anything very often in their daily routines, so few would be surprised to learn that even in something as important as determining the value of their Naples area residence, the calculation turns out to be less than straightforward. The ambiguity owes to the fact that it all depends on how you look at it.

In reality, there are two quite different approaches for determining any Naples home’s value. Ideally, both methods would produce the same value for the same property. That would be the Shangri-La outcome—a fine idea—but it’s seldom the case. The two methods are the Market Value approach and the Replacement Cost approach. Knowing how and why they differ explains why they yield dissimilar results.

When Naples homeowners examine their home insurance policies, they may find a breakdown of the replacement cost. The face amount of such a policy is meant to cover what the current cost would be to construct a similar building of equal quality—one that would have the same utility as the one that was destroyed. Such factors as materials, labor, the builder’s overhead, profit and fees are probably part of that calculation. In actuality, some of the costs that might be encountered may not be included, though: things like demolition of the old structure, debris removal, licenses and permits, but it also depends on the insurance policy.

The market value is an estimate of the amount a buyer would pay in today’s market to purchase the same home in its current condition. Right off the bat, you can see that this would include the cost of the land—so you might deduce that its market value would automatically be greater than the replacement value. Ideally, that might be true, if the home were brand new. But for structures that have been in existence for a while, that might or might not hold true. For a home in less than top condition, the total might be less… likewise, if the local residential market were in a slump. On the other hand, for older homes having architectural details with fine workmanship that is expensive to duplicate today, the reverse would be true. You get the idea: given the vast number of variables that can influence the difference between market and replacement value calculations, it would be miraculous if the two ever came out the same.

When you are buying, selling—or even insuring—your Naples area home, weighing market and replacement values is more than an abstract exercise. We’re here to help with those, and many other issues that will help you determine how to make the choices that serve you best.

Angela Graziano & Scott Twait, P.A.
The Gulf Coast Group
239.771.3900

The article Naples Area Home Market Values Seldom Equal their Replacement Values was originally found on The Gulf Coast Group