I understand why people try for sale by owner. On a three hundred thousand dollar house, paying both sides of the commission can run around eighteen thousand dollars. That is real money, and keeping it sounds simple: put up a sign, take some photos, wait for a buyer.
I have watched this movie for thirty years. Here is what actually happens, step by step, so you can decide with your eyes open.
Phase one: the phone
The calls start. People ask endless questions, some of them strange, and plenty try to negotiate your price before they have ever seen the house. You make appointments. You clean the house top to bottom, set the lights, get the family out. And a good share of those people simply never show up. No call, no text, nothing. Then it happens again the next weekend.
This is the part that wears sellers down before a single offer arrives. An agent's first unglamorous job is being the filter: screening the tire kickers, verifying buyers are qualified, and absorbing the no-shows so you do not have to.
Phase two: the paperwork
Say a real buyer appears and you agree on a number. Now someone has to draft a purchase and sale agreement. That means attorneys, usually one for each side, reviewing and redlining the contract. Someone has to hold the earnest money in escrow. Someone has to know that the inspection window, the appraisal deadline, the financing contingency, and the insurance requirement all run on clocks, and that missing one can put you in breach or let the deal die quietly.
Selling a home today involves far more documentation than it did twenty years ago. Required seller disclosures, equal housing rules, lender requirements. This is not a handshake business anymore.
Phase three: the inspection, where FSBO deals go to die
Every inspection finds problems. Every single one. I sell brand new construction and the inspection reports still come back with a page and a half of items on homes nobody has lived in. On a lived-in home, the report can run thirty to fifty pages with big color photos and language that reads like a hazard warning.
Now picture that report landing on an emotional buyer with no agent to put it in context, negotiating directly with an emotional seller who raised their kids in the house. The buyer sees a twenty year old air conditioner and a seventeen year old water heater and demands twenty five thousand off. The seller hears an insult to their home and walks. The deal collapses, the attorney bills are already spent, and the house goes back on the market having sat off-market for weeks.
The inspection report is not what kills these deals. The missing buffer is. Two agents talking each other's clients off the ledge is what keeps transactions alive.
The math at the end
The numbers I have seen over the years are consistent: a large share of for sale by owner homes end up selling below market, and they sit on the market far longer, often eighty to one hundred fifty days. Part of it is pricing without real comparables. Zillow and the neighbor's sale price are not a comp analysis. Part of it is emotional attachment, because an owner prices memories and a market prices houses. And part of it is plain fatigue: after months of no-shows and a blown deal or two, sellers take a weak offer just to be done.
There is one more wrinkle. Most buyers are working with an agent, and that agent will expect a commission to bring their buyer to your FSBO. So the savings that justified the whole exercise often shrink by half before you reach the closing table.
My honest take
If you have the time, the stomach, the legal help, and a hot market, you can sell a home yourself. People do it. But most sellers who try it are not saving eighteen thousand dollars. They are trading it for months of their life and frequently netting less than a well-run listing would have brought. If you are weighing it, at minimum get a real comparable analysis before you set a price, and read my piece on how I price homes in the Memphis area.
And if you want to know what a listing agent should actually be doing to earn that commission, ask me. That is a conversation I enjoy.