I think it's just your area of the country - it's worse than others and has been for a while. I have friends in Michigan who had houses and condos on the market for years. Luckily for one of them, her fiance broke the engagement so she had a home to go back to!

I would use both Craigslist and Zillow. They both offer huge exposure with more and more realtors using both, and it's free.

I tried to sell our old house in Mt. Clemens in 2006/7. I used Craigslist and never got anything except discount "will buy any home" types to respond. Zillow was pretty new at the time, it did not even have info for our neighborhood, so I did not consider using it.

I had used the FSBO sites when house hunting, but when it came to listing a home, the $ up front for a limited time listing never made any sense to me. One house, in particular, stood out for me. It was ALWAYS listed at this one FSBO site and the price never changed. Most of the houses on the sites I visited never went away - therefore never sold. I would follow the FSBO sites for a few weeks and see if anything changes before investing in them.

One limited-service broker near Mt. Clemens really scared me away. I called about a house I was interested in, and the discount broker told me how eager the family was to sell, that the husband had already moved out of state, that the wife was getting tired of managing the household and the teenagers alone. After that, you know I stayed away from them when I was looking for discount brokers to help me sell my house. Nothing like giving the buyer the advantage in negotiations!

For three months I was with a broker who was trying to get a semi-FSSBO business going. He gave me a realty sign and got me onto MLS, I did everything else. I think I was supposed to pay a half a point to him if we sold. Not one realtor ever showed the house from the MLS listing. I then spent a year in contract with a C21 agent. He specialized in my neighborhood, was really helpful to me when I was deciding if I should sell or convert the garage, and was always my back-up if I needed a "real" realtor. The house was shown several times, maybe as many as a dozen (by the same realtors who ignored the listing earlier). We lowered our price regularly. The house finally went into a rent-to-own contract with a woman I knew from work in August 2007, 18 months after we put it up for sale.

That was our experience. I hope it helps.

I am a realtor and I use craigslist. I am surprised none of your three realtors did that. Your house seems very tiny for that amount of acreage. It seems too small for a family, and sort of a handful (8 acres) for a single person. Just my .02. I would consider having an architect draw very loose plans (ie, not spend a lot of money) to show clients how it could look if it were expanded. Most people lack the ability to visualize changes. Your next realtor could explain that there are plans for expansion that convey with the house. Have the plans prominently displayed on a table (unrolled). I really think this might help you expand your market.
Best of luck.
Jo
Oh, and ftr, I will always show a for sale by owner if my client is interested. I ask the owner for 3% if the purchase goes through.

I'm from Michigan but living in Ohio and have been looking for exactly what you have, but there's not much around here with smaller houses or that I can afford that isn't terribly run down. In some sense jojoco is right, most acreages have bigger houses. Of course as a single person I don't need or want that, however as single income I don't seem to able to afford as much either and there have been instances where I look at the price and think, sure its an acreage but its still a teeny tiny house! As in, I'm never going to be able to resell that. I do think in Michigan right now it helps to have something special, river front, water, acreage. But areas where the employment market is zilch Flint etc., its just plain tough.

Being listed below what you owe doesn't mean much you know. If you overpaid to begin with and/or took an extra loan out to refinance your kitchen....people aren't going to pay extra because you overpaid or overimproved (I've been there and done that!:) Not saying you did, just saying that because you owe more than you can get doesn't mean that the buyer is being unreasonable.

I've been looking on Craigslist for potential retirement summer/camping acreage (in Michigan). Its free, certainly can't hurt and there are plenty of realtors listing there too. I have seen a couple places on craigslist that have a link to a site...mymisfsbo? something like that, where the potential buyer has to register then log in with a password every time the want to look. Not sure what that's about but it seems an unnecessary wall between potential buyers and sellers.

Yes, I bought the house when it was a sellers market. I was going to restart my field grown flower business and the house/land was perfect. The day before I closed on the house, I had a date with a really great guy. That great guy is now my husband. It was a no-brainer as to whose house we would live in! My house is just north of Battle Creek (sound like a good spot for you Marys1000?) LOL

The land does have the best hunting spot in the county (or so I'm told). But the job market here is so bad right now in Mi!

Thanks for the info! I'm going to check out Zillow. I appreciate any and all advice..

Actually I lived in Battle Creek till Jan 2004 and really liked it. I thought perhaps the economy was a bit better there than some places?
I would love to move back and yes it does sound right up my alley. I miss Michigan. Is your listing still up? Perhaps we can help with marketing?
I did a search and found 2 8 acre properties but I don't think either was yours. They both had gambel roofs though - not that common a roof type. Weird.

Great response to your post, hope it pans out. Worst case scenario is to spend $300 and put it up on the mls.

We listed our house on Craigslist, Zillow, and FSBO.net. We didn't get a single call for two weeks, but did have a few "we will sell your house" offers from realtors.

Then...we got a call on a Friday from a couple who had seen our ad online. They were out of town at the time and wanted to look when they came back into town on Sunday (Nov 2nd) around 4:30. We decided Sunday morning at 11:30 to do an impromtu open house. DH ran to Lowe's and put a couple signs out in the yard.

We got an offer from the first couple who came through. We had several other people come through over the course of the day. The original couple arrived at 4:30 and made us a full price offer PLUS $10K over our asking price if we would pay the closing costs. They were back within 1/2 an hour with a purchase agreement, earnest money check, and a pre-approval letter from their bank. We closed the day before Thanksgiving. :o)

It worked for us!

Persnickety, I'm so jealous of how painless your home selling process was. When we go to sell, we're hoping for the same. Our last home sale was pretty painful. Anyway, we're thinking of doing something similar for the first couple of months, and if we don't have any luck, to go with a realtor. I was wondering though about the logistics. Where did you get a purchase agreement? Did you draw it up yourselves? How did you know how to do all the paperwork, etc.?

Thanks!

We've done FSBOs before. In fact, it's the only way we've ever bought or sold. And my FIL has been VP of a local real estate firm for 15 years. LOL We've used both FIL's forms or gotten them from our attorney's office in the past.

Our buyer's use the same attorney we do, so they already had the same form that we would have provided them. Doing FSBO is really simple as far as the paper work goes. Just take a copy of the sales agreement to the attorney's office, provide them with the contact info for your mortgage company, and let them handle it from there. They'll let you know if they need anything else.

We're in the suburbs of Augusta, GA. We never really had much of a slow down in sales like they have in other parts of the country. It helped us that we were in an area with highly desireable schools and not many houses that were in our size & price range. :o)

We were lucky to sell our home at the very beginning of the housing crash, before it got really bad, but I was very pleased with our decision to list it with a flat fee MLS company. You get your home listed on the MLS, set your commission rate for a Realtor who wants to show it, but you also retain the option of selling it by owner. It worked well for us--we had identical offers from an agent's client as well as from people we showed the house to on our own. Of course, we took the FSBO offer and didn't have to pay a commission. Keep your options open!

Our current home, purchased in 2008, was only listed on CL, which is how we found it. We also looked at MLS listings via RE agent sites, but most of their sites were cumbersome to get into. I love CL! And as another poster stated, it is easily viewed from other states. Go for it!
Diane

We have our house listed with a real estate and we are also advertising it on Craig's list ourselves. We have an agreement with our realtor that we can sell it ourselves without paying a commission. We have had no one look from the real estate (listed for one month - but not the best time during the holidays) and 6 people who qualify and are seriously interested from Craig's list, ... but all 6 have to sell their homes - one would qualify without selling but they don't want to carry two mortgages even though they have just rented their other home. So there are people looking and if they do sell their homes, we are hoping they will remember our home if it is still available.

We had a couple of companies contact us and didn't email them back except one which sounded ligitimate - they were an investment group, we gave them the particulars about our property, but not our financial picture or any personal information and no last name, not what we owed etc. I told them we didn't have to sell but if they were seriously interested to make us a reasonable offer, we never heard back from them.

I think more buyers are looking at Craig's list and more sellers are putting their homes there. Definitely put your home on Craig's list and be sure to post the best 4 photos you have of the home, also use flickr or photobucket and have a link to more photos of your home and put the link in the ad. We are looking at Craig's list for when we sell our home and we only look at the ads with photos of the home. Make sure your home stays near the top of the list on craig's list, don't let it go to the next page, most folks don't look any further than the first page of ads. Just cancel the ad and re-up it - but no sooner than every two days.

A little house and lots of land, right up my alley, but not in your state - too cold.

In 1993 we couldn't seem to sell our home through a real estate (we lived in Arkansas then). We finally decided to sell it ourselves, put an ad in a newspaper of the next closest city to us and sold it. All the real estate agents said we would never sell it (for the price we wanted). We also had a relative set up a website for the home the same week, but when it hit the search engines we had already sold it - one guy called us from the website and was really mad it was already sold - saying "but it just came up on the computer". Thank goodness we were persistent or we'd still be there.

You never know who's looking to move where. Good luck.

Your house seems very tiny for that amount of acreage. It seems too small for a family, and sort of a handful (8 acres) for a single person.

One town we were looking in (in NJ) this ended up being the minimum amount of land per house by the time we were looking. Anyone that had land zoned under 7/8 acres were getting high prices, as at one time right before we got serious there was a 3 acre minimum, people holding that amount of land would get $300k just for land.

It was very common to see that sized house, as that was the type of town it was, the people that lived there fought to keep things the way it was.

Just ended our listing with the 3rd, yes, 3rd realtor. My house: 1000 square feet, 8+ acres, pole barn, brand new awesome kitchen, country living, trees,etc. Going on 2 years on the market. We are in Michigan and as you know, the economy here is poor. Very poor. My house was listed below what I owe! I'm not going any lower.

FWIW, zillow won't hurt nor will posting on craigslists. Craigslists was time consuming IMO, make sure if you post HTML code that you save it so that every time you need to repost, you don't have to type it out by hand. Things may have changed since then.

Get yourself a gmail account if you don't already have one, use this exclusively to sell your house. Gmail does a great job filtering spam, plus you get extras like a photo hosting site, blog as well as other things. I had all of my house photos in a photo album which I was able to link to in craigslists ads. Craigs only gave 4 photos, this allowed me to show more of the house.

With the blogger, you can make a page for the house, you can choose if it can get picked up on google/blog searches.

It's going to take time. The market is brutal, buyers are looking for deals. I had one guy stop me in the street asking about our house, he was watching a few others which were short sales, I guess he was wondering if we'd end up like that.

Also make nice fliers. I have to drive my daughter to school but will come back and give you some links to templates.

Good luck. I wouldn't mind a house that size with property as I would do the same as your dream as it is my dream as well to have a field and sell iris/daylilies as well as other flowers.

real estate - choose category

new listing

for rent or sale

one I used, although mine was 2 pages. I did save it to my computer so if you want a copy, email me. The 2nd page which I did not screen capture, allowed me to put more photos as well as a map of the area.

My actual flier to give you an idea of what you can do with the template.