The For Sale by Owner Handbook

The For Sale by Owner Handbook guides you step-by-step through the home-selling process. It gives you inside real estate trade secrets to sell your home like a pro.

A team of national leading experts-pros from: "Trading Spaces", Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, Country Living, House Beautiful, "This Old House", Yale University, University of California-Berkeley, New York University, American University, and the Fannie Mae Foundation (just to name a few!)—take you by the hand and teach you how to:

• Sell your home for the best price
• Make your home irresistible to buyers
• Negotiate contracts with ease (sample real estate contracts included)
• Hassle-free closing
• How to make sure buyers are financially qualified to buy your home
• How to get your home listed on the MLS (Multiple Listing Service)
• And every single step along the way

In addition, there are numerous interviews with national experts, including:

• Real estate agents – successful home-selling tactics
• Attorneys -- provide legal advice and contract tips
• Interior designers -- to make your home look more spacious
• Home inspectors -- What you want to see, what you don’t want to know (see the sample inspection report)
• Appraisers, mortgage lenders, title insurance pros, home warranty experts, termite inspectors, and more.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Step by step instructions... save 6%, 2007-12-11
I was introduced to the book from the FSBO site, SearchHomesOnTV.com Wow.. I was really surprised to learn how easy it is to manage a for sale by owner transaction. Piper does a great job of outlining the process and goes into detail yet not too technical. She demonstrates with sample forms and outlines the process. If you are considering selling your home on your own.. its worth the cover price..


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Excellent book that covers a lot of ground, 2007-11-26
I read about half a dozen books prior to listing my house for sale. This was one of the top two. It would be difficult for any single book to cover everything, and the different view points of different authors is useful to get. If you're looking to buy a book about the FSBO process you won't go wrong with this one, it is full of helpful information.


7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

Conflicting information; incomplete; poor grammar -- very bad!, 2007-09-27
This book appears to have been thrown together quickly in order to satisfy a market niche. First and foremost, it is lacking in detail. There's no way you can take what you "learn" in this book and then immediately sell your home FSBO. You need a lot more information on closing, home inspection, and numerous other issues on which this book barely touches. Furthermore, the formatting of the book, which highlights the opinions of "experts," is often contradictory without any insight into or explanation of the contrary opinions. Rather, mutually exclusive opinions (and facts!) are presented side-by-side. Finally, there are tons of typos and grammatical errors in this book -- which is predominantly fluff, any way. The type face is large and the book is thin. Although there isn't a lot of material to be found on selling FSBO (for obvious reasons), would-be FSBO sellers would be smart to continue their searches rather than stopping here.


3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Maybe in the right market..., 2007-09-22
With all due respect to the results the other reviewers may have gotten, I and my wife can say with certainty that this book, or the other FSBO book we bought, would not have gotten us through the kind of sale we faced in the turbulent California market at the end of 2007. The book had some very practical tips on prepping the house prior to sale, but would have provided little guidance in dealing with the kind of realtor & buyers that we consistently had to deal with, and who ultimately made the only decent offer on our place, but who ultimately strung us out (missing the escrow date in the disintegrating lending market), and tried to worm all kinds of preposterous conditions and discounts from us. We fell back on our very experienced realtor who knew exactly how to deal with such people and situations. I wouldn't not recommend this, or any other FSBO book (though the boiler-plate contracts in the other book were ultimately worthless), but BE PREPARED to have a GOOD realtor on your side should things go wrong. An green seller would not have the perspective to deal with sharky buyers and realtor-lender teams. Be warned.


5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

Better than FSBO Kit (Irwin), 2007-05-31
I bought this book and the FSBO Kit book by Irwin, and this one is far superior! This book is concise and packs more useful information, especially once you've found a buyer. The other has much less on negotiating, writing contracts, the steps leading to closing, who pays for what, estimates for repairs post-inspection, and tips for packing. I'd describe the Irwin book as more of a pep-talk, but it did give me the confidence to do it myself.

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