With any good piece of advice on house selling, there is always some sort of evidence behind it that shows that it can work. Spend two thousand dollars on gardening and you will increase your sale price by $15,000!; Sometimes you will. Other times you will just blow through $2,000 and still have to settle for below market rates on the sale. I sold my house by auction and got $20,000 over asking!; That person probably did just that, but did they mention what happens when the auction doesnt fetch a high price?

The one piece of advice that we, as real estate professionals, always hear is I am going to try to sell it myself and save the realtor commission and sometimes, wouldnt you know it, such a tactic actually works.

But other times, it doesnt, and the homeowner is left watching the value of their home drop, while the mortgage ticks up.

So what is the inside scoop should you try to sell by owner? Is it worth it to save a 6% commission? The honest truth is, sometimes but there is very little chance of actually figuring out when that sometimes is going to happen.

Real estate agents do provide a valuable service for all the money they take off you. They will guide you through the sales process, tell you what the weaknesses in your property are, they will run ads for you online and in print, they will handle the paperwork, negotiate a price there is a reason they take as much cash for their time, and that is that they are good at what you are not the inside info.

Added to that, more than a few property owners have found their sale harpooned at the last moment because they didnt have all the paperwork done, or the buyer hadnt been properly checked out and backed out late, or the property inspection revealed something was wrong that would require big money to fix. At the same time, there are plenty of happy sale by owner sellers for whom everything went great, but do you really want to take the chance on something going wrong, and do you really want to give all those thousands of dollars to a realtor driving a Lexus, while you are getting by on a 14-year-old Toyota?

There is another way. More and more, home sellers who know they are going to make a profit on their sale are deciding to forego the realtor route, as well as the sale by owner option, and are choosing to sell instead to companies that buy properties fast, for a slightly lower price than a realtor would be looking for, and have money in your hand today instead of in six months time.

These companies look at what your property is worth as is - give you that price for it, and then they spend the thousands of dollars and months of time, and weeks of labor and sweat, to bring the property up to its maximum value. For companies like these, they have the resources to sit on a property for months of even years waiting for the house to reach its potential; something that many home owners simply cant afford to do.

So if your property price is not moving like you would like it to be, and your house requires a lot of money spent to bring about a decent price in return, think about exploring that third option, and get the money you need today, so you can upgrade to a new home tomorrow.