The FSBO Math Most San Francisco Sellers Get Wrong
The median San Francisco single-family home sold for 125% of its list price in July. A year earlier it was 110%. That premium isn't luck. Listing agents here price below expected value on purpose, because a low number draws more buyers and competing buyers bid each other past what any one of them would have paid alone. The whole thing depends on enough people seeing the listing in the first few days. Which is where the FSBO math goes sideways. The commission is visible and negotiable. The premium you don't capture is invisible, and you never find out how much it was. On a $2 million sale you might save around $50,000 in listing commission. On the same house listed at $1.6 million, competition taking it to $2 million is $400,000 over list. You don't need the whole premium to justify the fee. There is one situation where selling it yourself clearly wins, and I wrote about that too, along with what flat-fee MLS services actually solve and what they don't: Read the ful...