Read This Before You Post your FSBO on Zillow (2021 Update)

If you’re thinking about selling your home, 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. However, if you’re planning to sell FSBO on Zillow, there are important caveats to using the platform.

Table of Contents: 

1. What is FSBO?
2. Why You Need to Be On Zillow
3. How Does Zillow Work?
4. How to List a House on Zillow
5. How to Edit an Existing Zillow Listing
6. How Does Zillow Make Money?
7. Zillow For Sale By Owner Fees (The True Cost)
8. How to Maximize Your Zillow Listing
9. How to Change Your Zestimate
10. The Importance of Pictures
11. Can an FSBO Seller Rely on the Zestimate for Pricing?
12. Zillow For Sale By Owner Reviews
13. Should I Use the Zillow Make Me Move Feature Before Going Full FSBO?
14. Conclusion

What is FSBO?

FSBO simply stands for For Sale By Owner. Some people prefer to sell their homes themselves, instead of using a real estate agent. 

Selling your home yourself means you get more money from the sale (no commission), you have more control over the sale process, and you can devote all your energy to marketing your home for sale. There are some downsides to a FSBO home, such as needing to qualify buyers, accounting for your own safety when showing the home, figuring out how to market your home well, and complying with local laws and regulations about FSBO. 

There are definitely pros and cons to choosing the FSBO route. If you decide it is right for you, Zillow is definitely a good place to start marketing your home to potential buyers. 

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. So you need to have your home listed on these sites with updated images, pricing, and a captivating description of the property. 

How Many FSBO Listings Are on Zillow?

The exact number of FSBO listings on Zillow is hard to pin down; it changes as homes go on the market 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). 

Here are some other top cities and how many FSBO listing they currently have as of April 2020 for some reference: 

City	Number of FSBO Listings
Detroit, MI	129
Atlanta, GA	101
Orlando, FL	98
Dallas, TX	84
Los Angeles, CA	65
Nashville, TN	63
Denver, CO	41

How Does Zillow Work?

Zillow is an online home selling and buying marketplace. They show listings for homes for sale by agents and by owners. It is a great tool for marketing a home for sale as it lets you show as many images as you want and has a good layout for describing the relevant information about your home. 

The best thing about Zillow for home sellers and buyers is that they offer free marketing for your home. Finding a buyer or finding the perfect home is not an easy task, and Zillow provides an easy-to-use platform to browse hundreds of listings in your area. 

As a seller, you can also post unlimited photos as well as walkthrough videos, virtual tours, and write a compelling description of your home. 

In-market buyers can find your home by searching by price point, area, number of beds or baths, home type, as well as other filter features. 

Lastly, Zillow allows interested buyers to easily contact the listing agent, whether it is you (the owner) or someone else, easily and quickly. 

Pro tip: Zillow agents charge between 2 to 3% of your home’s final sales price in commission. Top-rated agents at Clever only charge 1% or a flat fee of $3000, and they’ll list your home on Zillow and dozens of other amazing MLS sites. 

How to List a House on Zillow

1. First, make an account on Zillow. 

2. Next, claim your home: 

• Under the “Buy” tab, search your exact address or the area you are in (City, State) and click on your home
• Once in your home’s details page, scroll down to the Owner Dashboard
• Click on “I’m the Owner” button

3. Go to the homepage and click on “Sell” on the top navigation:

• This has a drop-down, select For Sale By Owner
• Then you show see the page below

4. Type in the address of the home you want to sell and click continue

5. Then you will see a map, and you will be prompted to confirm if the property’s location on that map is accurate

6. On the next page, you can build the details page for your home:
   • Price
   • Video walk through
   • Images
   • Home Facts (beds, baths, HOA fees, and description)
   • Open House details
   • Any related or additional information
   • Checklist of home details 
   • Contact Information

7. Once you’ve finished uploading all the information about your home for sale, click the check mark at the bottom of the page, and then Post For Sale By Owner to publish the home listing

How to Edit an Existing Zillow Listing

Editing an existing listing on Zillow is easy. You need to log into your account (the same one you used to create the listing). Click on “My Zillow” in the top right corner. Then, select “Listings” from the My Zillow toolbar and choose Edit Listing, Remove Listing, or Extend Listing from the editing menu.

When in edit mode, you can add or delete photos, change the price, or change the status of the listing to sold or pending. When done editing the listing, don’t forget to click Update at the bottom of the details page to save your changes. 

Note that Zillow keeps FSBO homes active for 90 consecutive days from the listing date, but you can extend for an additional 90 days at any time. 

You can also edit your listing by going directly to the listing’s page while being logged in. 

How Much Does it Cost to List on Zillow?

Zero dollars. It’s free to list your house as a FSBO on Zillow!

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, there is always a catch, of course. Zillow is actually making good money off of your listing.

Really good money, in fact. Zillow reported annual revenue of $2.7 billion for the 2019 year, up 106% from the previous year. So how does Zillow make money if listing a house is free?

How Does Zillow Make Money?

Zillow makes money from 4 unique pipelines: 

1. Charging property management companies to advertise their listings on the Zillow Rental Network
2. Offering Premier Agent Websites, which include free premium designs, multiple listing service search, and a unique domain
3. Real estate agents purchase advertising on Zillow’s website that targets buyers in their local markets
4. iBuying

If you take another look at Zillow, you will notice the advertisements on the sidebars. 

Here are a few examples of advertisements on a Zillow listing: 

All the advertisements are organically placed through each details page. So much so that you might not even notice they are advertisements. But they’re sprinkled in there and that is one of the largest sources of income for Zillow. 

Zillow For Sale By Owner Fees (Exposing the True Cost)

You pay nothing for a Zillow FSBO listing – at least not upfront. The true cost comes after a buyer fills out a form to speak with an agent on your home’s listing.

Zillow makes a lot of their income by selling advertising space to real estate agents, like the image above. Agents pay to be listed on your home’s listing, and once a buyer agrees to look at your listing they’ll be connect with that agent.

This is where the true cost of Zillow FSBO comes from: The home seller pays the buyer’s agent commission fee, which is usually 2.5% to 3% of the home’s value. On a $200,000 home, we’re talking about $5000 for the buyer’s agent commission alone.

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.

In other words, if you’re not paying for a product, you are the product. 

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.

The reality is that even if you are trying to sell your home as a FSBO, the buyer will likely still work through an agent. Zillow heavily promotes real estate agents, which means if someone is interested in your home, they will likely get in touch with an agent before they make it to you. 

If your buyer is working with an agent, there will still be fees the agent will collect throughout the sale, typically around 2.5% of the final sale price. At the end of the day, even if you are selling FSBO, you will still need to pay some sort of agent fees. 

To help out with these selling costs, work with Clever to get transparent pricing on the selling and closing costs. Clever negotiates prices with agents so you only pay 1% or $3000 to your listing agent. If you’re paying a buyer’s agent commission, you might as well have an agent in your corner fighting to get you the best deal possible.

As a FSBO seller, you can still offset Zillow’s agent-focused marketing by making the MOST out of your listing description.

How to Maximize Your Zillow Listing

There are three MUSTS for when you are putting a home for sale on Zillow, especially if it is a FSBO home. 

1. Put Your Phone Number at the Top
2. Make Facts into Benefits
3. Figuring Out the Price

Put Your Phone Number at the Top of Your Listing

In order to minimize the chances of your lead flowing away from you and into the hands of a different 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.

Many FSBO listings make the mistake of relying on their number showing up on the sidebar, but Zillow is hiding that on purpose. They make zero money if the buyer connects with you directly.  This is just Zillow’s business model and even if it seems unfair, you need to play the game and use it to your advantage. 

Turn Facts Into Benefits

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 what not to do for a list of features:

1. Close to restaurants
2. Remodeled kitchen
3. Open floor plan
4. Large back yard

In contrast, do this for your list features on your Zillow listing: 

1. Save time getting to your favorite hangout spots
2. Completely decked out kitchen lets you be the master chef 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.

Pro Tip: 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.”

Figuring Out the Price

The third, and possible most important part of your Zillow listing is the listing price. You might be tempted to under-think the price, but trust us, it is extremely important. List too low and you lose out on profit, list too high and no one will view your home. 

Just about every deal (unless it’s a super hot seller’s 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.

As a FSBO listing, consider offering to pay for a home inspection for accepted offers. This 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.

How to Change Your Zestimate

The easiest way to change your Zestimate is to claim your home (covered above), update all of the details about your home. Yep, it’s that easy. Zillow has made updates to make the Zestimate feature much faster in recent years. 

Here’s exactly how to do it:

1. Find your home on Zillow
2. Touch the “edit” button next to your home
3. Verify you are the owner
4. Select your home type and edit the facts.

Note that you can’t change the actual Zestimate itself, but you can edit features like the number of bedrooms, finished square footage, unique features like hardwood floors, landscaping, and granite countertops. If you’ve updated the home, this is where you can improve your Zestimate.

Note that there are external factors outside of your control: Zestimate also factors in on-market data like the listing price, comparable homes, days on market, and off-market data like tax assessments and other publicly available data. 

Can a FSBO Seller Rely on the Zestimate for Pricing?

This guide wouldn’t be complete without discussing one of the most controversial aspects of Zillow: the Zestimate.

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 pay attention to the Zestimate, and if there is a major discrepancy between the Zestimate and your listing price, it can really hurt you.

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.

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:

1) 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 an image that forces them to stop scrolling. 

Some of the most successful marketing campaigns in history have broken traditional color “matching” rules to gain attention in the crowded marketplace, like when the infamous Fyre Fest had all their influencers post an orange block on their Instagram’s at the same time. The out of place image was jarring and made people stop scroll and figure out what was going on. 

One pro tip is to use a photo that has lots of natural contrast. Try taking a picture of the front of the house when the grass is green and the sky is bright blue without clouds. Here is an example: 

2) 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. The best advice is to just have a very professional, high-quality image as your thumbnail. If it looks like the picture was taken on a polaroid camera on the dreariest day in 1989 you’re not going to see a lot of traffic. 

A Quick Note About Pictures:

For uploading files on Zillow, you’re better off 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 for 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.

Zillow for Sale By Owner Reviews

Zillow is one of the most popular online portals for buying and selling homes. They have 36 million unique monthly visitors on their site. With this in mind, they have a multitude of both positive and negative reviews. 

Those who are happy with Zillow say the site is easy to navigate, update, and search on, that they found fantastic agents through Zillow, and that the prices they saw seemed fair and easy to view. 

Here are a couple of examples: 

Those who are not satisfied with Zillow say they are difficult to reach, inaccurate with pricing estimates, and do not disclose information about where leads go. 

Here are a couple of examples: 

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 having 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 sidebar that siphons off your buyer leads to a real estate agent. This is huge–for the reasons we’ve already covered.

I took a peek 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 who are not in any hurry to sell, but could move if they had to fairly quickly (eg: 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 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.

One final word: We’ve partnered with the folks at Clever Real Estate to offer agents that offer full-service (negotiations, marketing, paperwork, MLS listings – the whole shebang), for a flat fee of $3000 or 1%. 

Good luck out there!