Beginning contact with a For Sale By Owner lead can be delicate business. Some of them have bad attitudes toward agents. Some of them just didn’t want to pay the extra money and still others wanted to try and sell their home themselves before turning to an agent to get the job done. An easy way to get your foot in the door is to call them up (or stop by the property, we’ve always been big fans of that follow-up tactic!) and tell them you have someone interested in buying their property – you can even give them a lead’s name if you have to. Tell them you owe it to your client to take a look at their home.

At this point it becomes a matter of convincing the FSBOs that they’re better off using an agent. Before breaking out the heavy guns, warm them up by offering free advice on preparing a home for showing, some FSBO safety tips, you can even offer to make sure the price they’ve set for the home is a fair one. Once you’ve built a rapport with the homeowners, find a way to ask them tactfully why they chose to do a For Sale By Owner versus hiring an agent to list their home for them.

Depending on their answer, there are a few arguments you could use as to why listing with a real estate agent is better than doing For Sale By Owner. For one, if they don’t have a buyer already lined up, it can be hard to find one, since only so many people will see the big old ‘For Sale By Owner’ side in the front yard. Unless the homeowners have the money to do their own marketing (like in a newspaper) they’re not going to attract many potential buyers. Without an agent, they can’t even get their property in the MLS, which is where most agents go to find homes for their buyers.

However, WITH an agent, their home is marketed much more aggressively, in the newspaper, in real estate magazines, in the MLS, some agents will even put together a mailer and postcard campaign to tell as many people about the home as possible. And since the home is getting exposure to so many more people, there’s the opportunity to raise the listing price (which can always be lowered if the home doesn’t sell).

These are the types of logical arguments you should be making when following up with your For Sale By Owner leads. They may still shoot you down, but they don’t have much logical reasoning to stand on if you present your position in the right way. If that doesn’t work, you can go for the emotional appeal and outline the distasteful and possibly dangerous aspects of having doing a For Sale by Owner.

For example, do they realize they’ll have deal with a bunch of strangers traipsing through their house? If you were their agent, you’d be taking care of all that! Or did they ever think about the fact that some sicko could see the For Sale By Owner sign, wait until the lady of the house is home alone, and then call to get a viewing of the house with all sorts of nefarious deeds in mind? Okay, you might not want to go overboard with that one and scare them, but you get the picture!

Do what you can to convince them that using an agent is in their best interest. Tell them you’ll lower your commission percentage to 1%! For doing basically nothing but paperwork (and handling the paperwork is a major concern for most FSBOS), that’s not bad at all! Of course, if you can go for 3%, do it! The bottom line is, you’ve got to be prepared to give them some help even if they don’t wind up listing with you. While you should go in there telling yourself you’ll get the listing, if that’s ALL you’re there for it will show and you won’t be listing anything for the homeowners.

Even if you don’t convert the FSBO to a client in your first meeting, don’t give up. Just because they said “no” today, doesn’t mean they’ll say “no” tomorrow! Add them to your mailing list designed just for FSBOs. Send them weekly updates (via email and regular mail) about homes selling in the area, any statistics you may find on the success of selling a home FSBO versus using an agent, tips on doing a FSBO, etc. Lay out for them in terms they can understand what you can do for them as opposed to what they have to handle as a FSBO. Build up trust and rapport and prove to them that you’re there to help them out. You can even offer to forgo the long-term listing agreement, so they can back out of the contract if they are dissatisfied. The important thing is proving yourself trustworthy and useful to the homeowner. If you can prove that you’ll make things much easier for them in the long run, there’s no good reason why they wouldn’t list with you.