The Real Estate Green Sheet Self Help For Home Sales.

• Author: KANE, ROGER

Selling a home without a real estate agent can be a profitable endeavor. However, not every-one is capable of handling the responsibilities that come with selling a home. There are telephone calls that need answering, advertisements that need to be placed, showings that need to be scheduled, negotiations that need to be hashed out and paperwork to complete.

For homeowners with the expertise and time, there may be no better way to keep their equity from being divided among real estate agents than to take charge of the sale of their homes.

For all the rest, there are alternatives to the conventional real estate-agent driven sale that can save time and money.

"The fact is, you need some kind of help," says Kirk Wickersham, owner of Anchorage's For Sale By Owner Assistance Program.

Sellers Have Options

When it comes time to sell a home in the Anchorage area, sellers have four choices: sell on their own, use a discount broker, use a real estate agent or use the FSBO Assistance Program, Wickersham said.

Since the inception of his FSBO Assistance Program six years ago, the company has served about 1,200 clients. Of those clients, 75 percent have successfully sold their homes. During the same period, real estate agents were successful 73 percent of the time. Discount brokers chalked up a success rate of 54 percent and sellers on their own were successful only 20 percent of the time, Wickersham said.

Multiple Listing Service statistics reveal that the FSBO Assistance Program is the quickest way to sell a home. In the last six years, the average time it took Wickersham's company to sell a home was 26 days. For the same period, discount brokers sold homes in an average of 28 days. Real estate agents took 40 days to sell.

The time it takes to sell a property is an important consideration, but the bottom line is how much money can a seller save?

Saving Money

The average commission paid to real estate agents is 6 percent of the purchase price. In 1999, the average purchase price of a home in Anchorage was $170,000. On the sale of a $170,000 home, the listing agent's commission is $10,200. If the owner of a $170,000 home has $30,000 equity and the property is sold by a real estate agent who collects a 6 percent commission, more than one-third of the seller's equity is consumed by the agent.

Depending on the level of service sellers are looking for, the FSBO Assistance Program and discount brokerages can save them thousands.

Wickersham's company charges a...