Completed FSBO Documents or Do-It-Yourself?

There is alot to be said for ‘do-it-yourself’ and saving money any way you can. Conversely, the cliche ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish‘ is a cliche because it’s true — pinching pennies isn’t always wise.

So when it comes to getting For Sale by Owner documents for your real estate transaction, what makes more sense: DIY legal forms or completed, ready-for-signature FSBO documents?

In the last ten years, with the development of better software creation tools and digital document distribution, do-it-yourself legal forms software has become a fast-growing product category.

Any motivated attorney and web developer can get together and create downloadable, fillable legal documents and a cool-looking law website in just a span of a few weeks. Because of this, there’s lots of competition in the space.

Problem is, some of those do-it-yourself “solutions” skip right past the concerns of real people: that it’s not all that easy to know where to start when you’re trying to tackle a multi-step legal process.

Real estate legal forms are a good example of that.

 

The Real Questions on FSBO Documents

It’s pretty easy to find FSBO forms and real estate purchase agreements of varying types across the web. But people’s real questions aren’t so easy:

– Does this FSBO Purchase Agreement match the exact type of transaction I’m trying to create?

– Is this document missing anything, or skipping any of the important instructions I need to properly execute and file it?

– Do I even know enough about this process to know what I don’t know?

– And if I really mess up creating or filing of these documents, how much money could it cost me?

Do-it-yourself is great if you have some experience in a specific matter. An experienced hiker can take on a bit of a mountain. An experienced runner might decide to challenge a marathon. And person with a bit of legal or real estate experience might do just fine taking on the documents needed for a home sale transaction.

But if you have no experience in something at all, is do-it-yourself a good idea? Answer that with another question: is it a good idea for someone who has never run around the block to start by running a marathon?

If you have no legal or real estate experience, a bit of affordable help is not such a bad idea. Now, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel and hire an attorney to create completed FSBO documents for you from scratch — that would be overkill. But you also don’t need to download a batch of PDFs and try to figure it out on your own from there, either.

 

So are Completed FSBO Documents the Best Option?

RealtyPact goes to that satisfying middle ground. We create completed FSBO documents for people who are handling their home sale transaction ‘pro se’ (by self): just answer some simple questions about the sale, get signature-ready documents back, then follow the instructions provided for filing.

And we’ve done enough of these document packages since 2002 that we’re not re-inventing the wheel every time, either. So we can help FSBO Buyers and Sellers create their Contracts, Deeds and Disclosures at a price that is truly affordable.

In our estimation, spending just a little bit more money on completed FSBO documents reassures the Buyer and Seller to know that their contract package is done right. Using do-it-yourself forms doesn’t have that same level of experience or review behind it. So why be penny-wise and pound-foolish?