Off Market Sales- The Pros and Cons
Lately, there seem to have been many off market sales. What is an off market transaction and what does it mean to you? An off market sale is a listing that is never listed publicly on a Multiple Listing Service and may not be publicly searchable.
Why do Sellers sell off market? There are many reasons. Preparing a home for sale is time consuming and can be an investment. Sellers may need to move out or have to live very lightly in a home while it is being marketed. There is the time and money spent to paint, make repairs and improvements and stage a home prior to it hitting the market. Some Buyers may not be up for this. This category could include people with very young children, older sellers, and sellers who may not want the public to know about their transition and just people too busy to want to go through the time consuming process of preparing their home for sale.
Typically, the Seller’s agent will reach out discreetly to other agents or may post something in a real estate channel that makes other agents aware of the opportunity. There will be a limited time frame to view the home before seeing if the home could be sold. Recently, with the rapidly moving real estate market, these sales have grown from a consistent 20% of the market to 40% of sales.
The pros of this type of sale is that you may be able to sell you home fairly quickly with minimal preparation, investment and intrusion. The cons of this type of sale is that you will never truly know the value of your home by not exposing it to the entire buying public on the MLS. For some Sellers, this is a tradeoff they will take. For other Sellers, knowing definitively what their home is worth by exposing it to the entire buying public is worth it!
