Selling a home using only Zillow

The time that elapsed from the day our renters left until the day we closed on the sale was 54 days.

It seemed like we did something at the house almost every day during that time span.

We advertised the house only using yard signs (1 For Sale and 5 Open House) and the website Zillow.  We re-used the For Sale sign my father-in-law used when he last sold a house on Lake Livingston.

I re-activated my Google Voice phone number to put on the various signs and on my listing in Zillow.  This turned out to be a good decision.

We just sold a home we had been using for rental/charitable purposes over the past 4 years.  My father-in-law's experiences and his daughter's (my wife) experiences helping him sell homes they'd owned in the past pre-disposed us to sell the home on our own, without a realtor.  We had a tentative plan to engage a realtor if the sale took more than 2 months to complete.  Thankfully, that did not occur.

The process started several years prior, though, when I claimed the house as mine on Zillow.  After that, Zillow sent me information on their thoughts as to the house's value about every week or so, both as a rental and as a sale.  I kept tabs on the estimated value of the house this way, and it was an important factor in how we priced the house for sale.

The house was vintage 1970's.  3 bedrooms, 2 baths, 2 car garage, 1550 square feet on a cul-de-sac lot of 0.3 acres with a completely fenced back yard.  Blue carpeting, wood paneling and original stove and oven.  Possibly even original air conditioner (this will make an appearance later in the story).

Over the 4 years that we owned the house, we'd been in the house on at least a weekly basis.  We mowed the lawn ourselves at least every 10 days during the growing season.  We had a good relationship with the renters and kept tabs on what was going on in the house.  We were still amazed at the amount of work we found that needed to be done when they left.

A week before the renters left, I went over to the house and took 10 exterior pictures.  I went over early in the morning as the light from the east put the front of the house in the best light.  I should have waited until the afternoon to take pictures of the back of the house as the early morning light made it difficult to get good views.  I uploaded them to Zillow and started working on improving the listing information.

The day the renters left, we got in the house and started prepping.  We cleaned it from top to bottom, repaired sheetrock, switched out electrical plugs, rekeyed the locks.  Vacuumed.  Vacuumed.  And then vacuumed some more.  We stripped contact paper out of cabinets, cleaned stickers off of mirrors (thanks, Goo Gone!).  We replaced a section of the chainlink fence in the backyard.

We cleaned out the garage. And discovered that the garage door that should be controlled by an opener no longer was.  The control arm had been forcibly removed from the door at some point.  We called in a company to fix the issue.

We gave away the furniture left behind by the renters through letgo or by leaving it on the front lawn for anyone to come by and pick it up.  Some small things went to the local Goodwill, and some things are still waiting at the house we live in for us to drop off at the dump.  We found a stash of empty wine bottles and put them out for recycling.

A week after we reclaimed the house, I went in and took still pictures of all of the rooms.  Those went up on Zillow within a day.  A couple of weeks later, I went through the house and did a video walkthrough with my phone's camera.  that, too, went up on Zillow.

After about 2 weeks of prep, I started hosting Open Houses.  I would post them on Zillow and using signs in the neighborhood.  I had them on Wednesday evenings and then at some point on either Saturday or Sunday.  On the weekends, they would usually be in the afternoon or evening to try and time it to be after church.

We got very little traffic for the open houses, but occasionally someone would stop by.  We would also get calls for tours through the house.  I would try to be there for those, but if I couldn't either my wife or father-in-law would lead the tour.  If we did not live close to the house, this would have been very tough logistically.

Most of the phone calls we got inquiring about the house were from investors.  They would call up, inquire whether it was still for sale, and then offer us half of our asking price.   I would say 80% of the interest in the house was investor interest.

We finally got a phone call from the eventual buyers' realtor and they scheduled a showing.  They did a fairly good inspection of the house.  They climbed up in the attic and took a look at the a/c (he owns an a/c company).  We confirmed that, to our knowledge, the a/c was original to the house and ought to be replaced.  Later that afternoon another couple came by and toured the house.  We thought they were the parents of one of the previous couple, but it turned out that was not so.

A few days later the buyers came back in and toured again.  Shortly thereafter, they made an offer for our asking price, but with us paying 5K of closing costs.  Their agent asked us how much commission we would be paying her.  I made the mistake of saying either 2 or 2.5 percent.  She immediately jumped on the 2.5%.

We made several inquiries of the agent as to what the 5K would be used for on the closing and she always deflected and did not answer our questions.  This was the most frustrating portion of the deal.

We agreed to the offer and the couple scheduled an inspection.

It came back about as expected, clean but suggesting the house needed a new a/c.

As a result of the inspection, the couple came back and asked for 10K in compensation for the a/c.  We said no, with no counter.  The agent was taken aback, but we informed them when they toured the house that the a/c would need to be replaced.

They went ahead with the deal, and we worked on scheduling a closing.

The closing went smoothly, even if we did not end up at a title company that we would have chosen on our own.

And we were no longer the owner of the home.  We sold the house for right at Zillow's "zestimate".