I had studied the market for a year, attended umpteen open houses in my Kanata neighbourhood and kept in touch with real estate agents to keep on top of selling prices.

That, I would soon find out, was the easy part.

With plans to quit my job and move to Cobourg to begin a freelance writing/editing career, it was time to put my research into practice to sell the two-storey house we have called home for nine years. Because my husband will also quit his job and join the ranks of the self-employed, we decided we needed to maximize our dollars, thus the decision to go it alone - almost - on the home-selling front.

We turned to Grapevine Home Marketing Consultants, the company that helps for-sale-by-owner people market their homes. I plunked down my $295, which bought me a professional For Sale sign for my front lawn and a spot on the Grapevine website, where I could market my house by posting photos, a blurb extolling its virtues and statistics about room sizes, type of flooring, etc.

While I was confident that my research had helped me price the house right, we were somewhat apprehensive about the sale. Would enough people see the listing?

To hedge our bets, we had decided that our listing would include the banner, "Agents welcome at 2.5 per cent," meaning that if an agent brought us a buyer, we would pay him for it. But as we were typing up our listing, we had a moment of bravery and decided we would try it without the banner for a few weeks, before we panicked. We're glad we did.

We had also decided that we would not have open houses, since they often attract the wrong crowd - people who dream about living in a house like ours, but who can't afford it, and snoops like me, who like to look, but have no intention of buying. Private viewings, we decided, would attract the serious buyer we were seeking.

We had watched enough home shows on TV to know that the best way to generate some buzz was to organize a weekend of private viewings, so that everyone knew they would be competing against others. We were thrilled when the phone rang off the hook the first day our listing appeared on Grapevine. Everyone, it seemed, couldn't wait to see our house.

We booked 10 appointments over two days and received three offers well over the asking price. Fantastic!

While making sure the house was spotless for the viewings was a major headache, and guiding strangers through the house while they looked in my closets and flushed my toilets was both nerve-wracking and exhausting, this, too, turned out to be the easy part.

Here's the problem: we liked all three families who offered to buy our house. Their offers, including conditions, were similar. How to choose? And how to tell the others that they had lost out? A moral dilemma, indeed.

With an agent, we would not have been forced onto this emotional roller-coaster. We wouldn't have met the people viewing the house; we wouldn't have had to negotiate with them; and we wouldn't have had to be the ones to disappoint them.

And, as we were to find out, we would not have had to guide first-time buyers without an agent through the process, including the inspection. Getting through the process turned out to be more time-consuming than it ought to have been.

Unfortunately, we had to start the whole selling process over from scratch when our buyers were struck by a family tragedy and could not continue with the sale. After having talked back and forth on the phone for two weeks, and meeting them again during the inspection, news of the accident hit us hard. It was as though a member of our own family had been injured. Our hearts went out to them.

We vowed, however, that we would not get emotionally involved with the next set of prospective buyers. That was easier said than done. We did receive another three fantastic offers after another hectic weekend of private viewings. We chose one and had to disappoint the others. It was most difficult telling one couple, who had fallen in love with the house when they viewed it during Round 1, that they had been bested again.

Selling a house without an agent is definitely not for the faint of heart.

Published in The Ottawa Citizen on Oct. 20, 2007
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