Selling my home - need advise on how to advertise (Chantilly: flat fee, sales)

[knick33]

I'm getting ready to put my townhome on the market and wanted to get everyone's opinion as to where I should advertise. Are there any local websites you guys use to look for homes? The only one I know of is Craigslist. Is the Washington Post worth it?

I'm in South Riding or better known as Chantilly.

Thanks

[irisheyes13]

I always recommend militarybyowner.com We looked at a number of places that were posted there and the person who bought our home had found it on this site as well.

[vanyali]

You're looking to sell your townhouse, not just to rent it out, right? So much of the market for housing in the DC area is made up of transfers from out of the area that I think the realtors' MLS system is really your best bet.

In other markets, people move around within the area and know the local ways to find properties to look at, but people moving into the area for the first time have no idea how to do this, and no way to know. (Military buyers may be different -- they might be better able to find people to ask advice from, and learn about websites like the one suggested above. I don't know much about that particular website or how much traffic it gets).

There are discount brokers in the area who are willing to just put your listing on the MLS for a nominal flat fee of a few hundred dollars and let you handle the rest of the transaction on your own. Many others will just discount the % of the sales price they'll take, but it sounds like that's more than you're willing (and probably more than you have to) spend. Keep in mind that getting a listing on the MLS doesn't just make it available to other brokers -- so many websites put MLS listings up on the Internet for anyone to search themselves that, if you can get on it, you can get a really wide audience for your listing.

You can look at Moderator cut: use a dm to recommend a realtor and click on the house in the upper right corner to look at the MLS yourself, and I think that broker might be willing to enter your listing for a flat fee -- he's talked about it before, but I'm not 100% sure what his current feelings are on the subject.

I'm not sure exactly who else is doing this nowadays, but you can try to track down someone from Fairfax Realty -- they've traditionally attracted agents who are willing to work at a deep discount, and I would expect a lot of those agents to be pretty hungry right about now.