Imagine selling your home yourself (For Sale by Owner) and later getting sued by the buyer. In this article, I’m going to teach you how to avoid that.

Gary Howell is a real estate agent with EXP Realty. He works in the Jackson Township area of Stark County Ohio which includes portions of Massillon, Canton, North Canton, Canal Fulton and Clinton Ohio.

If you’re in the market to sell your home without a realtor, two of things you must legally have are the lead-based paint disclosure and the general property disclosure. Essentially these are notices that you give to the buyer, which says, this is the condition of my house. It’s for your benefit to provide every prospective buyer with these disclosures, because these two documents are what prevent you from later getting sued.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’re trying to sell your home yourself, and the home has a a small crack in the foundation. To you it seems trivial so you don’t mention it to the buyer. You sell your home and move on with your life.

Later on, however, the buyer discovers that there’s a crack in the foundation and now they’re blowing it up into a huge big deal. They’re mad and now they want to sue you over it.

The point of having a property disclosure is to be able to say to the buyer, “Hey, I told you about this. As a matter of fact, here’s the paper which you signed, acknowledging that you were aware of the crack in the foundation and were willing to accept the home in that condition.” Having and using these two disclosures are really an intelligent way to avoid getting sued.

Everybody knows that lead is bad for you, and especially for children, because they can eat paint chips and get lead poisoning. So, if you do not have your prospective buyers sign the lead-based paint disclosure, and then later they find out there’s lead paint in or on the house. They could potentially sue you.

But again, if you have them sign your disclosure that acknowledges the presence or possibility of lead based paint, if somebody in the future tried to sue you, all you have to do is pull out that piece of paper and say “you acknowledged that you were aware of this”. At that point, there’s nothing more they can do. They’ve got nothing at all.

On the property disclosure, there’s a lot of questions that have to deal with issues that might be present in the house. it’s three or four pages of questions.

When using these property disclosures, I recommend you fill them out completely and sign them. Then, any person who wants to come and see your house, when they arrive, you hand them the disclosure. And if those people make an offer on the house, you would have them sign a copy of the disclosure and give a signed copy back to you with the offer. Do not accept an offer until they have signed the disclosures.

Zig Ziglar once said something to the effect of, if you help enough other people get what they want, you can always get what you want. And so one of the things that I do for people in the Jackson Township area, who are trying to sell their homes themselves, is I give them a free a copy of the property disclosure and a copy of the lead based paint disclosure which they can use.

So if you own a home in Jackson Township, Stark County, Ohio, or if you own a home in Massillon or Canton and you want to try to sell your home by owner, contact me. I would be happy to give you copies of these two documents.

Again, they are for your best interest. They keep you from getting sued, and they just let the buyer know what the present condition of your house is. By signing it, the buyer is acknowledging that they are aware of your home’s condition.

Gary Howell – Jackson Township Real Estate Agent, Stark County, Ohio
Phone or Text (330) 880-6725
Email: gary.howell@exprealty.com
Read Gary’s Bio Here.