How to Sell a House Fast in a Slow Real Estate Market: A 30-Day Plan for Motivated Sellers Paperback – October 27, 2008

I was stunned that this book only has only 15 reviews on amazon. It was packed with amazingly useful information to sell my home FSBO. Where I live brokers rule the roost. But because I bought at the peak, I didn't have a choice. I had to sell on my own or lose my entire investment. I followed the advice in this book and invested in staging and marketing, and it paid off hand over fist. Much of the advice is not obvious. People mobbed my open houses, and offers started to roll in on the first day. I did have a couple friends good at decorating come in to give me advice on redecorating to maximize broad appeal. Brokers trying to win my business essentially told me they couldn't really do any better than I was doing already.In summary, I am in contract already less than one month after putting the house on the market myself, and the broker's commission is all cash in my pocket. I am eternally grateful to the authors. Please note that you have to invest a little money to make the home looked professionally decorated. With help from artistic (gay) friends, design magazines and helpful salespeople at Pier 1 Imports, Home Goods, and similar stores, the home was transformed from boring and functional to ready for a design magazine photo shoot. The money invested in staging paid off 10 time over as people walked in stunned, ready for a bidding war, in a severely depressed market.If you read this book and follow it religiously and aggressively and have help from friends, you do not need to hire a broker and pay 6%.

"What and how to organize our paperwork for selling was very helpful"the best part of the chapter on organizing our paperwork for selling was getting our certificates of occupancy and the certificate of completion done well in advance of putting our house up for sale. As it turns out, we had an open permit for a room in our home that took months with the help of an expititor/architech to get legalized.Had we not followed the "check list" on seller required documentation to sell, this would have been a deal killer for us, since the time to obtain the c of c from the town took months, and our buyer would not have been able to wait that long for us to get that to comply with the contract of sale. Plus, we had purchased another home before selling ours, which would have been even a more serious issue since our loan was contingent on our sale. Whew, that might have been a financial mess for us had we not take the time to review our responsibilities as sellers.Plus the book had many other checklists, in timeline order, that we found very helpful.Easy read, but a bit technical on 1004 mc appraisal addendum, so we let our appraiser do that for us for a nominal fee. That really helped us out in pricing out our home based on the current supply and demand factors beyond the appraisers suggested listing price. Key!!!

An interesting approach to getting your house on the market. I ended up not following very much of the plan but I'm nevertheless glad I read the book and thought about their suggestions.

This is a good book if you want a basic book on buying a property and if you have a relatively basic house. If you have a special property this may not work so well. Most of what was in the book I and most realtor's already knew -- maybe it depends upon where you live how good the realtors and information is? In our area people are pretty savy and this is boiler plate stuff.

My husband and I are in the process of selling two homes and found Ray Cooper's book, "How to Sell a House Fast in a Slow Market" very educational. We have utilized several of his strategies to help us to market our homes. We are currently in the process of creating an optimized website for our homes and have priced them using Ray's guidelines. This book was immensely helpful when dealing with a sluggish real estate market that has an over supply of inventory. We believe that using Ray's ideas will allow us to sell both of our houses fast and for the price we want. We encourage everyone who has a home to sell, to buy this book. It will be an excellent investment!

This book really helped us, not only with the steps to get ready to sell, but helped us do them in the right order, which now in hind site really makes sense. These guys really know their stuff!!Also, the strategy for verifying the broker stats really gave us the inside scoop on where the best buyers were coming from and which agency and agent had the "goods"!Almost all the agents we interviewed claimed they were the #1 agent, but our appraiser follow the books formula and gave us the real list of who the key agents really were for our location and property type.

But love it you will - If you're serious about selling your home. This is an aggressive book and you need to be seriously aggressive about selling your home. It's kind of like outlining a story. You don't really WANT to outline, but know you need to. You SHOULD follow the steps in the book but may decide to take some short cuts. All the steps may not apply to your situation but what will apply to everyone is that you want to sell your home in a timely manner at the best possible price. For that, this book gives you the tools to do that.

I thought it was an easy read and informative very good read for one who wants to read about staging and selling ur home