In some cases, people think the best idea may be to sell their home themselves. This is usually not a good option. Here is a list of just some of the basics that as your listing agent I will do. Saving money on real estate commissions can cost you a fortune in lost time and lost money for your home. Here are just a few things to consider:

What if . . .

• What if the buyer's lender called you up to say that the buyer's rate lock was not being honored by the lender, and now the buyer could not get the loan they wanted due to a higher-than-expected interest rate and wanted to cancel their contract? Let's say this occurred after all contingencies had been removed. This is a real case scenario. What would you do next?
• What if the buyer's lender's appraisal came back lower than the agreed-upon selling price? What would you do or who would you contact for assistance? Is there anything you could do in advance to remedy this situation? This is a real case scenario.
• Your single family home or condo in a homeowner association was involved in a lawsuit in the past? Do you know what information to provide to the buyer, or whether you have to? (Result of 2009 California court decision.)
• What if your market value is lower than your loan amount? You may need to work on a short sale.

These are just a few items to consider when thinking about selling your home yourself. At the end of the day, it just isn't worth it. Contact me today and I can help you sell your home for the most possible money and make sure you have an easy transaction.

Are you thinking about selling your California real estate or property? Do you have a home or other residential property you are considering selling here or anywhere else in Los Angeles or Orange County? I can help. Please fill out my quick real estate sellers request form and tell me about your property. There is no obligation and your information will be used exclusively to provide you with superior real estate services.

As mentioned by Donald Trump in "Think Like a Billionaire": ("It all sounds like a headache to me, which is why I've always recommended using a broker." (p.19))

June 6th, 2004: The New York Times
The Sweet and the Sour of 'For Sale by Owner'
By LYNNLEY BROWNING

We are a do-it-yourself nation. Call it Emersonian self-reliance, bootstrapping individualism or the Home Depot effect, but many Americans would rather take care of the home front themselves, thanks. That applies to selling their houses, too.

As home prices have soared across much of the nation, many people of modest incomes have found themselves in half-million-dollar houses - and have decided to cash in. But because a typical agent's fee is 6 percent, some $30,000 of such a sale goes out the picture window at the closing. It's enough money for a starter BMW, or a year's tuition at many colleges.

Reaping such a windfall, of course, is hardly automatic. You have to do plenty of homework, not to mention all the agent's legwork. Some sellers lose patience and hire an agent anyway.

Still, more Americans are deciding that the potential for rich rewards is worth the headaches. Among the property owners who sold their homes in 2003, some 14 percent - or one in seven - bypassed agents, according to the most recent data from the National Association of Realtors, which, naturally, is uneasy about the trend.

That is down from the record level of 18 percent, in 1997, but up from 13 percent in 2001. And as rising mortgage rates and a sluggish economy inspire cost-cutting moves, do-it-yourself selling may spread. A proliferation of Web sites devoted to the idea prompted the association to predict last October that "for sale by owner" homes could soon account for one sale in four.

Ready to try it? Take a deep breath. The first step is to educate yourself, through how-to books or dozens of Web sites, about things like determining your home's value and knowing which legal documents to prepare, where to get them and how to fill them out properly. In addition, you will spend from a couple of hundred dollars to perhaps a few thousand to hire an appraiser, pay a title search company to prepare documents and other forms, and perhaps hire a lawyer to review it all.

But no matter how much how-to or professional help you get, showing the property and negotiating the price are still your jobs.

The first task can be a nuisance. Basically, it means that you must let any stranger track mud across your carpet and peer into your closets, instead of having an agent screen for serious buyers. The second is a true art - and one at which experienced agents are usually more skilled.

But the biggest and most difficult task is finding a buyer, and at a time when 71 percent of prospective homebuyers consult the Internet (versus 2 percent in 1995), yard signs and classified ads may not be enough. That is where new types of Web sites dedicated to do-it-yourself home sellers come in handy.

Consider the experience of Ellen and Juan Carlos Leon, a young couple with a 4-year-old daughter, Isabel. Ms. Leon is an engineer, and Mr. Leon is a Web site manager. The Leons wanted to sell their two-story colonial-style house in Port Washington, N.Y., so they could rent an apartment in Manhattan and buy a vacation home in the Poconos. An agent's commission would have made a down payment on that second home impossible. So in early March, Mr. Leon paid $199 to ForSaleByOwner.com, a Web site, to advertise the house until it sold.

He posted photographs of the house on the Web site. He set a price of $539,000, wrote a detailed description of the property and listed his telephone number at work, at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.

Two weeks later, after receiving dozens of inquiries, the Leons sold the house for $536,000. They paid $5,000 to a lawyer, who worked with the title company and handled the closing, but saved $32,000 in commissions. "I was shocked," Mr. Leon said.

If Mr. Leon makes it sound simple, so does Colby Sambrotto, the chief operating officer of ForSaleByOwner.com, based in New York. The company says on its Web site that "selling a home is not rocket science." It says property owners used the site to sell more than 27,000 homes last year. Fees start at $79.95 a month, a sum that lets you post six color photographs and a 3,000-word description. It also lets you track the number of times people look at your page.

A deluxe package puts your property on a regional multiple listing service - a way to reach a large number of buyers - for a one-time fee of $699. Still, plenty of go-it-alone attempts turn sour.

In December, Ivan Quijano, 50, a corporate communications consultant, put up for sale his three-story, two-bedroom town house, just blocks from Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., one of the nation's hottest markets. Mr. Quijano, armed with a Harvard M.B.A. and an A-list of clients, needed the cash to bankroll the start-up of his own consulting firm.

He posted a for-sale sign in the window with his asking price - $889,000 - and his sister's cellphone number. Then he went on vacation to his native Colombia for three weeks. When he returned, his sister, Claudia Quijano, who lives nearby, had received 25 phone calls - but mostly from agents who wanted to represent him.

"They were trying to give me all sorts of scary reasons for not doing this on my own," Mr. Quijano said. He said an agent warned him that he could be sued later by a buyer if documents were prepared incorrectly.

But Mr. Quijano knew that all the standard forms and disclosures were available online or in how-to books: he consulted a publication at the Nolo Web site. He also brushed aside pitches from agents who offered to put his property on multiple listing services. "I didn't want to waste the money," he said.

BY late January, though, he had shown his town house to only three people and had received no bids. "I began to think that maybe there was a little bit of the trust factor," he said, explaining why buyers appeared skittish. "Maybe people wanted to do it 'by the book.' "

He threw in the towel and hired an agent from Alain Pinel Realtors. The agent recommended an interior paint job and new carpeting and suggested that he rent stylish furniture and sleek appliances from a "staging company" - which, for a fee, spruces up houses to make them more attractive to buyers. Mr. Quijano spent $7,000 to get the place ready.

By late April, after the agent had held four well-attended open houses, the town house sold for $800,000. Mr. Quijano said he had been happy to pay the agent 6 percent of that: $48,000.

"People interested in high-end properties here are used to dealing with a prestigious real estate firm," Mr. Quijano concluded.

About 35 percent of sell-it-yourself homeowners will fail, at first, to find buyers and will resort to paying to have their houses put on Web sites or multiple listing services, said Mr. Sambrotto, of ForSaleByOwner.com. Putting your house on a listing service could cut your savings in half, though, because such services typically require that you pay about 3 percent to any agent who monitors the listing service and finds you a buyer.

The most common pitfalls, according to agents and Web sites alike, are pricing your house too high and failing to do enough marketing. Beyond the "for sale by owner" sign in the yard and the newspaper ad, they say, it is good to pay a nominal fee for a basic online listing.

But Walter Maloney, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors, said that the sell-it-yourself Web sites' multiple listing services included only tens of thousands of properties, while the association's service, Realtor.com, had more than two million, which is 95 percent of all listings. For that exposure, sell-it-yourself sites can have their houses listed on Realtor.com for a fee and an agreement to pay a commission to the agent representing a buyer who finds your house through that site. Agents also increasingly troll other Web sites for leads. If one finds you a buyer, you'll still be ahead by 3 percent. Oh, well: that's still a semester at college, or a Corolla.