- For-Sale-By-Owner (FSBO)
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A home the owner is selling himself without the services of a licensed real estate agent. In the industry, for-sale-by-owner homes are known as FSBO (pronounced FIZZ-BO) listings. Not only does the owner avoid paying an agent to sell his own house, but he typically does not pay a commission to the agent of any potential buyers. As a result, buyers' agents don't have an incentive to show the property to their clients, and the home cannot appear in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) , a broker-maintained database of homes for sale. This in turn means that for-sale-by-owner listings don't appear on most brokerage websites, which are powered by the MLS.
Redfin is one of the few sites to combine broker-listed properties from the MLS with for-sale-by-owner homes from Zillow.com, ForSaleByOwner.com and Oodle.com. The only major source of for-sale-by-owner homes not included on Redfin is Craigslist, which does not share its data. Though we show FSBOs on our site, Redfin chooses not to tour or write offers on these homes because they don't pay a buyer's agent commission. For this reason, many agents don't show these listings to their buyers.
