Having bought and sold quite a few houses now I can say I won't go down the FSBO route anymore. I successfully bought my first house this way, but selling it was a train wreck. Not fun dealing with selling your own home at all. I eventually listed it with a realtor and sold it a few weeks later.
Later in life though spending larger amounts of money on a home I would always recommend finding a good realtor. Someone friends/family can recommend. There are just hundreds(if not thousands) of pitfalls to buying or selling a home.
On a different note I did have the opportunity to build several data driven local realtor sites a few years ago. They were deceptively simple looking on the surface, I mean all you do is sort and filter house results right? The process of syncing to the RETS system proved to be really clunky and complex. Imagine building a site on top of a database you have to query to discover the tables, fields, and datatypes, and oh by the way it could CHANGE SCHEMA at any time. If your broker was part of multiple MLS (Multiple Listing Services) then you could have to deal with completely different structured DBs. I handled these issues by building a normalized table for listings I could map the data into. MLS data was pulled into a 1:1 mapping table of the same name upon querying the schema. I had to build a Sql Script generator to create the tables. It was very frustrating dealing with schema updates.
The whole process was interesting to me though as to how your listing data is handled when you list a house for sale and how others can gain access to it. Long story short you have to pay to play. Zillow for example is paying (or should be) to access your for sale listing data once entered in the a regional MLS. This is likely several thousand a year conservatively (per MLS). This gains them the right to access the data, however, many times these agreements are 20-30 page legal documents. My first time seeing one of these was extremely uneasy (I nearly didn't sign it). Again fascinating in the case of Zillow I know for a fact they are violating this agreement in our particular region when they hold onto listing data and images past the duration of a listing (sold or removed). They simply just keep it indefinitely it appears. On the other hand keeping up with 100+ MLS agreements across the US would be impossible as well.
Later in life though spending larger amounts of money on a home I would always recommend finding a good realtor. Someone friends/family can recommend. There are just hundreds(if not thousands) of pitfalls to buying or selling a home.
On a different note I did have the opportunity to build several data driven local realtor sites a few years ago. They were deceptively simple looking on the surface, I mean all you do is sort and filter house results right? The process of syncing to the RETS system proved to be really clunky and complex. Imagine building a site on top of a database you have to query to discover the tables, fields, and datatypes, and oh by the way it could CHANGE SCHEMA at any time. If your broker was part of multiple MLS (Multiple Listing Services) then you could have to deal with completely different structured DBs. I handled these issues by building a normalized table for listings I could map the data into. MLS data was pulled into a 1:1 mapping table of the same name upon querying the schema. I had to build a Sql Script generator to create the tables. It was very frustrating dealing with schema updates.
The whole process was interesting to me though as to how your listing data is handled when you list a house for sale and how others can gain access to it. Long story short you have to pay to play. Zillow for example is paying (or should be) to access your for sale listing data once entered in the a regional MLS. This is likely several thousand a year conservatively (per MLS). This gains them the right to access the data, however, many times these agreements are 20-30 page legal documents. My first time seeing one of these was extremely uneasy (I nearly didn't sign it). Again fascinating in the case of Zillow I know for a fact they are violating this agreement in our particular region when they hold onto listing data and images past the duration of a listing (sold or removed). They simply just keep it indefinitely it appears. On the other hand keeping up with 100+ MLS agreements across the US would be impossible as well.