The decision-making processes of nontraditional or for sale by owner (FSBO) home sellers engaged in the listing and sale of their homes

In spite of promises that the Internet would allow people to buy and sell their homes without intermediaries, real-estate agents still control approximately 90% of the transactions made in the 2.5-trillion-dollar residential real-estate industry. Existing literature has yet to provide conclusive arguments as to why the expected disintermediation has not occurred. Tentative arguments include claims that policy is biased in favor of agents, or that agents have a broader social network than their customers which helps them sell faster and for a better price. Most studies make the assumption that agents matter. They analyze the real-estate market from the perspective of the intermediaries (formerly called "middlemen") or agents/brokers/realtors, as opposed to the perspective of their clients. Furthermore, academic literature relies heavily on data provided by the National Association of Realtors, which fails to provide details on transactions that do not involve agents, or that involved them in limited ways.;This study suggests an alternative viewpoint on the real-estate marketplace: that of sellers who decide to work without an agent and hence implement their own unique methods to list and sell their private residences. Their perspective is enlightening in several ways. First, sellers supply the asset (the house) and typically pay for the commissions of both the seller's agent (SA) and the buyer's agent (BA). Sellers are therefore the customers of real estate services in the real-estate industry, yet their perspective is largely overlooked. Rather home buyers, who often do not pay commission, are the focus of the NAR and much research. Furthermore, by looking at how individuals attempt to sell their homes without an agent, it is possible to unbundle the services that agents typically offer as part of the full-commission model. This allows observing concretely how sellers value different services and establish their relative importance in a real-estate transaction. In turn, knowing the value that sellers attribute to the various services helps explain why they choose to pay for some of these services, or to go at it alone. Finally, focusing on "for sale by owner" (FSBO or "fizbo") sellers helps us understand how people manage to navigate in a marketplace that is heavily biased in favor of agents during a time where information is available through information and communication technologies (ICTs).;Given that so little is known about FSBO sellers, this study is exploratory. It does not aim to test particular hypotheses, but on the contrary to document the diversity of practices through which individuals gather information, understand the options that are available to them, make choices, and proceed to sell their homes. In order to do this, Hawkin's and Mothersbaugh's "Consumer Decision Model" is explained and incorporated into this study for structure. The model demonstrates the five steps a consumer experiences (right side of the model) while enabling us to examine multiple internal and external influences (left side of the model) that affect this decision process. Using a series of ethnographic interviews FSBOs were invited to tell their listing and selling stories while in the midst of this process and/or after experiencing a sale retrospectively. Some FSBO individuals were interviewed a second time to reflect in more detail on the experience they had gone through. Video recordings, websites, flyers and other documents they used were also gathered. Through these cases, this research presents the FSBOs at the time when they implemented their selling strategies and explores their reasons for doing so.;This study gathers findings from a range of participants who possess different backgrounds and selling experience levels. Some of the subjects were first time home sellers and others had three FSBO selling experiences. We learn from their stories how these unique backgrounds, selling experiences, and other internal and external influences affected their decision processes to list and to sell. The ethnographic design and open-ended question format exposed the critical "whys" and "hows" of their individual and unique journeys. The findings from this study reveal evidence of seller activity to include extensive social networks, comprehensive market analyses, and ICT and Internet use that combined with a high level of individual determination. Sellers demonstrated the reasons why they had chosen this method to sell. They defined the value for the services they performed themselves, and presented what they felt was an appropriate commission or fee level to pay others for these same services. Sellers revealed details about the complexity of the agency relationship as it related to privacy, information asymmetry, and in some cases agent deceit or impeccable honesty. Sellers also demonstrated how they interacted with multiple real estate agents to share ideas, address market value discrepancies and price concerns, and handle agent cold-calls while using their own prior buying agents for current selling information. This study provides a foundation for a larger quantitative or mixed method research study and will serve to extend current models of information seeking and decision making in the literature.