Today’s ForSaleByOwner.com Press Release Misleading

Today while I was on Twitter, a couple of tweets (Twitter messages) caught my attention.

~Study from Realtors find that FSBOs sell quicker & for closing to asking price than agent-assisted sellers!

~Realtors highlight the benefits of FSBO. Yes, I’m not kidding!

ForSaleByOwner.com posted a press release including some information from the National Association of Realtors “2008 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers” that was out of context. They then went on to falsely proclaim, “In today’s housing market where prices are falling, sellers need to know that Realtors’ own data suggests that home owners can get more money selling by owner.” No, it doesn’t.

The second tweet links to the site’s blog post about the press release and shows a page from the NAR report showing that the median sales price as a percent of asking price was 97% for for sale by owners (FSBO) where the seller didn’t know the buyer and 96% for all agent-assisted sales reported in the survey. Another link in the blog post has another page from the report showing that for sale by owner homes sell faster than homes sold by agents.

Those two pieces of data alone and out of context do make us Realtors look rather incompetent, but let’s look at the median sale prices reported. The median sale price for FSBOs where the seller didn’t know the buyer was only $150,100 while the median sale price for homes sold by an agent was $211,000, over 40% higher!

Should we conclude that we Realtors can get sellers 40% more, if we sell their homes? Of course not.

Conclusions based solely on these numbers aren’t accurate because the FSBOs and agents weren’t selling the same mix of homes. According to the report, for sale by owner sales were much more common in small towns and rural areas. The type of housing was also different. 18% of for sale by owner sales were mobile/manufactured homes.