FSBO Thought For The Day: Get Lawyered Up
Get lawyered up when you first consider selling the home, yourself! The biggest mistake, homeowners make, in the very beginning of planning to sell their home is to not obtain the benefits of an lawyer (and better yet a real real estate lawyer) to council with and to draw up the original sales contracts for you, or your attorney to fill out (if they haven't explained to you how, or if you're uncomfortable filling them out, use the attorney to fill it out) and for your prospects to fill in their particulars and sign Business Trusts.
Now most people watch late night (or early morning) t.v. and those real estates investors that make “millions and millions of dollars flipping their own real estate”. They offer you free advice, to you, that you should go to the local Office Depot, or your local Walmart & Office Max and somewhere in the back of the store you will find, land contracts for sale, or wills & other “generic legal documents” that will suffice for selling your home.
Now, I'm sure they're generic and I'm sure that they might pass the smell test to sell a car, or a boat. Actually, in those contractual arrangements, you won't be putting yourself up for too much liability, but a home, think about it?
A car, or a boat, what's the financial liability for you, if the buyer's check bounces, or those hundred dollar bills turn out to be counterfeit? Or let's say they let you keep their “gold watch (you know the kind I'm talking about)”, until Friday (when they get paid and then you can cash their check), what happens then, Boobey?
According to most legally trained people, you're screwed! All documents are not the same. The ones you buy at the local stores are generic, in other words they'll work for both, the buyer & the seller, both parties are equally protected and both parties are held liable (it's gonna cost them something, equally).
THERE IS A BETTER WAY FOR YOU, THE SELLER: There's a good reason why an attorney goes to three, or more years of school, than do “normal” college graduates. They study, practice and learn from experience how to protect you from that “nefarious buyer”, the one that's out to get you and enrich, themselves.
A home can be thousands of dollars, on the cheap side and millions of dollars on the high end, if you were to meet up with a stranger offering you a “great deal” for your home and you had a “worthless” contract, to sell it, you can be paying those dollars back to your mortgage company for a long time.
Now you can be sorry and you can try to get the Mortgage company to cut you some slack, but if YOU didn't protect yourself with a “legal contract of sale”, guess what their answer will be?
And once that deed has been done, you can't go back and redo that contract, so best (for you) to get it done properly, in the beginning!
Besides, most generic contracted forms lean toward the buyer and against the seller and even most “real estate, or REALTOR” contracts lean toward the buyer. This is in no small part due to the state authorizing the contracts, or sales forms, and the state, obligates everyone, in that transaction to look out for the buyer (the seller is expected to be more experienced, by the fact that they have at least purchased a home before, so most buyers are thought to need protection).
Hiring an attorney will afford you many advantages, not the least of which is their forms will stand up in a court of law, if not you have someone, other than the buyer to sue for your loss. Also, most lawyer drawn contract can be written to protect the seller, more than the buyer, so that all the wording and paragraphs will be more lenient to the sellers side, which will protect you.
Finally, most lawyers will allow to talk to them and ask them questions, which they can answer for free, usually for the first hour. That way you can decide for yourself, whether they can accomplish for you what you think you might need and not spend a whole lot of money in order to satisfy your curiosity.