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.
