If you’re thinking about selling your own house, you absolutely must do a Zillow FSBO listing.
90% of buyers find their house on the internet, and luckily enough for you, many of them stumble into Zillow at some point during their home search.
Why You Need to be on Zillow
Between Zillow.com and Trulia.com (also owned by Zillow), Zillow Group accounts for nearly 64% of the entire online market share for buyer traffic (and leads).
If someone is in the market for a house, there is a very strong chance that they will, at least at some point, end up looking at Zillow or Trulia, which makes them the most important website for you to be on.
You’ll also love the price tag for putting your listing up there.
How Many FSBO Listings Are on Zillow
The exact number of FSBO listings on Zillow is hard to pin down, as it changes as things go up for sale and off the market every day–but in the state of Florida alone there are currently over 10,000 listings that are FSBO ( some of which are classified under the “make me move” category.
Should I use the Zillow Make me Move Feature before going full FSBO?
The “Make me Move” (MMM) feature on Zillow is an interesting product. It’s basically used as a way for people to list their house without actually fully committing to have it up for sale.
Many posters have expressed the desire to “test the waters” as a reason they went up as an MMM.
The major downside of MMM is that the listing doesn’t get as much exposure to searchers as a normal listing. Very few people choose the MMM option compared to normal listings, and while they are included in the default Zillow search, they are labeled with a blue dot (potential listing) as opposed to a red dot (an actual listing) in the search.
The major upside of the Make me Move feature is that there is no contact form on the side bar that syphons off your buyer leads to a real estate agent. This is huge–for the reasons we’ve already covered.
How Much Does it Cost to List on Zillow
It’s free to list your house as a FSBO in Zillow!
Sounds to good to be true, right? Well, there is always a catch, of course. Zillow is actually making good money off of your listing.
The Secret that Zillow Doesn’t Want You to Know
Zillow makes its money by selling advertising space to real estate agents. If you’ve ever taken a look at the sidebar when browsing Zillow.com you’ll notice that there are a few agents typically listed. One will be pre-selected, and if a potential buyer fills that information card out, their inquiry will be shipped off, as a lead, to one or more real estate agents.
That’s right.
Someone could be filling that card out, thinking that they are talking to you, the seller, about the house. Instead, they are being connected with a buyer’s agent–which would normally be fine, but you’re trying to sell your house FSBO without using an agent.
The experience is even more slanted on mobile, where the “call” button goes directly to an agent that is paying Zillow and not the lister.
But don’t worry, you can offset a lot of this by making the MOST out of your listing copy.
What you MUST put at the top of your listing to save your leads
In order to minimize the chances of your lead flowing away to an agent, you MUST make it VERY clear at the top of the listing description that you will only answer inquiries directly on your phone—and to provide your phone number right at the top of the listing.
Most make the mistake of relying on their number showing up on the sidebar, but remember, Zillow is hiding that on purpose. They make zero money if the buyer connects with you directly. This is just Zillow’s business model.
Once you’ve taken care of that aspect of the listing copy, you’ll want to move on to creating text that conveys benefits, and doesn’t simply list features.
There’s an important distinction.
Here is an example of a list of features (avoid this):
1) close to restaurants
2) remodeled kitchen
3) open floor plan
4) large back yard
In contrast, here is what a list of benefits for these same facts would look like:
1) Save time getting to your favorite hangout spots.
2) Completely decked out kitchen let’s you be the master chief you always wanted to be.
3) You’ll never miss a show being in the kitchen–there’s nothing but open air between you and the living room.
4) The dogs can practically walk themselves with so much open space in the backyard.
The famous copywriting legend, Gary Halbert, calls this translating “facts” into “benefits.”
Make sure you have at least a few dozen facts written out before you start translating them into benefits.
Zillow limits the amount of copy you are allowed to put in the listing, so you will have to be concise. Don’t explain things that the pictures already take care of.
Make it personal to reinforce to the reader that you are an independent seller: write using “I”, “my” and “you.”
For example: “I’ve been in this house for 10 years and have created some amazing memories here.”
The third tier to the perfect sales copy, is the offer. This is fairly straightforward in home selling, it’s your price! But you can still take the risk of fear out of the transaction even further.
Just about every deal (unless it’s a super hot sellers market) comes with an inspection contingency–meaning the house must pass inspection to the standards of the buyer, or they are allowed to call the deal off and they can get their initial deposit or “earnest money” back.
What that boils down to is, the real risk in a deal for the buyer is they might be out of pocket for the cost of an inspection if it turns out something is majorly wrong with the house.
Consider offering to pay for a home inspection for accepted offers–it’s only a few hundred bucks, and it could help to push a buyer over the edge that was hesitant to get involved in a deal with a FSBO seller.
Gary Halbert talks about the importance of “de-fearing” the transaction. Ask yourself what you would be worried about if you were about to buy a house, particularly from a non-represented seller, and work to address those concerns ahead of time.
Spend a ton of time on the offer, it’s the most important thing in the sales process.
The Importance of Pictures
Zillow displays every listing with the price, and one thumbnail image. That thumbnail has to be compelling enough for people to click on your posting. The default view for searches on Zillow is to see FSBO houses and Agent-listed houses all jumbled together, which is a great advantage for you.
Get that thumbnail right, and you’ll get a ton more traffic to your listing, which means more showings and more chances to sell.
The two most useful types of thumbnail pictures:
Most people on Zillow are using a picture of the outside of their house, which is fine, but a lot of them are extremely close to the siding of the house. The problem with that is, there isn’t any contrast.
When a user is scrolling through tons of listings at the speed of light, you need to have something that actually grabs their eye.
Some of the most successful marketing campaigns in history have broken traditional color “matching” rules to gain attention in the crowded marketplace.
The first way to add a ton of contrast fast is to take a picture of the front of the house, with a nice clear blue sky in the background. Let me show you an example:
It’s an easy way to look professional and stand out on the search results with the other houses.
Another option that I’m seeing more and more is to take an aerial shot, and use the green grass as the eye-grabbing color contrast.
That’s a fine option, if you have access to a drone.
I’d keep things simple and just grab a photo with a prominent blue sky in the background.
A quick note about pictures:
For uploading files on Zillow, you’re better uploading a larger image resolution and letting Zillow reduce the size to fit whatever ratio they are looking for.
If you upload a picture that’s too small to Zillow, it will look really blurry when Zillow’s system tries to increase the size.
Zillow recommends using the dimensions of 2048 x 1536 when uploading pictures to your listing.
Can a FSBO Rely on the Zestimate for Pricing
This guide wouldn’t be complete without discussing one of the most controversial aspects about Zillow.
The Zestimate is a home valuation tool that is supposed to aid sellers in figuring out what their home is worth.
The problem is the Zestimate can easily be off by 10% or more. Buyers see that thing, and if it comes out way below what it should be, it can really hurt you.
One Zillow FSBO seller was actually priced in at a whopping $40K below what a bank had appraised the property for (which is a real value, unlike the Zestimate which is a rough ballpark estimate).
For your purposes, the Zestimate can be useful to get a general idea of what your house is worth, but don’t treat that number like it’s a slam dunk either way.
I’d recommend checking out a few different home valuation tools to see what the others guys say. Realtor.com and Redfin.com also have value calculators.
Should I use the Zillow Make me Move Feature before going full FSBO?
The “Make me Move” (MMM) feature on Zillow is an interesting product. It’s basically used as a way for people to list their house without actually fully committing to have it up for sale.
Many posters have expressed the desire to “test the waters” as a reason they went up as an MMM.
The major downside of MMM is that the listing doesn’t get as much exposure to searchers as a normal listing. Very few people choose the MMM option compared to normal listings, and while they are included in the default Zillow search, they are labeled with a blue dot (potential listing) as opposed to a red dot (an actual listing) in the search.
The major upside of the Make me Move feature is that there is no contact form on the side bar that syphons off your buyer leads to a real estate agent. This is huge–for the reasons we’ve already covered.
I took a peak around online for some Make me Move success stories, and people have had some success with finding a buyer on their own with this method.
Here is a thread with some people that have talked about their success stories.
Getting these results are not typical, but it can’t hurt to try.
MMM is perfect for people are not in any hurry to sell, but could move if they had to fairly quickly (if the right buyer came along). In a major sellers market, MMM could be a perfect way to sell it yourself to a buyer desperate to have a chance at a home without 13 other offers coming in a day after it goes on the market.
Keep in mind, real estate agents actively prospect off of the Make me Move list, so expect to get cold calls from real estate agents trying to get you to list your house with them. If you don’t want to deal with this, you can grab yourself a burner phone number with our phone calling system to filter them out.
Conclusion
If you want to have a shot at selling your own house, and you don’t already have a prospective buyer on hand, you’re going to need to be on Zillow–that’s where all the buyers are (and that’s why Zillow makes the big bucks). 🙂
The thumbnail image is super important to catch the attention of the “scroller.”
Keep in mind that Zillow is active selling your buyer leads through the silly “learn more” contact form on the sidebar.
You’ll also want to make sure you put at the TOP of the listing text: We will only answer inquiries about the house at this phone number: (insert your number here).
That one trick will help mitigate the loss of your buyer leads contacting the a random real estate agent that paid Zillow for the lead.
Selling FSBO is tough, but Zillow can be helpful to get in front of some buyers for free. Keep in mind, there are a lot of window shoppers out there, so be patient with the process.
Good luck selling!
As usual, feel free to shoot us an email (contact form on the sidebar) if you have any questions, or leave a comment below.
Cheers,
Ryan
This post was extremely helpful. One problem we’ve encountered is that our Zestimate is almost 10% below what we believe it should be, and we think this may hurt our FSBO prospects. We recently added a bedroom and full bathroom, but none of the real estate websites have updated that information. We’re not sure if the public records are outdated or what. Anyway, I manually changed the number of bedrooms and bathrooms on the Zillow listing, but it didn’t change our Zestimate (which Zillow claims it updates immediately upon such changes). I’m not sure how to combat this, and I’m worried that prospective buyers will think we’re delusional with our asking price.
The Zestimate has certainly been the bane of both agents and sellers existence for years now. It’s either too high or too low in many cases. What market are you selling in? Agents tend to be good at setting client’s expectations, so if you end up working with a buyer that is using a buyer’s agent, you may have more luck (the agent has had a chance to educate the buyer on the real values in the market). Also, look at Redfin’s calculator as well. Go to Realtor.com and get their estimate. Try to find one that is most accurate and use that as your proof for any potential buyers that balk at your price.
When my Zestimate was too low (I was using Make Me Move), I contacted Zillow (with back-up information) and they increased the Zestimate accordingly.
We just put $40,000 in renovations in our house but zestimate is killing us because the zestimate is before renovations. How do we get Zillow to change this?? !!
Hey Heather,
You can actually claim the property and update the facts to include the renovations so you’re not missing out on that. Here is a link to a forum posting on Bigger Pockets that describes this in more detail: https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/311/topics/484655-any-way-to-get-the-zestimate-changed