Just driving around Utah County I’ve noticed fewer for sale by owner signs this year than I have in the past.

I subscribe to a “for sale by owner service” that sends me new listings every day. It covers the whole state but only a few are in Utah County. I refer the listings outside the local area to other Realtors. After all, 80 percent of all folks who want to try it alone first eventually list with an agent, according to the National Association of Realtors.

I can remember back in 2003 when 14 percent of the nation’s residential sales were by owner. Last year that dropped to 10 percent with 4 percent sold to friends or relatives and 6 percent sold to perfect strangers, NAR research found.

Managing the sale of your home has become more complicated than ever. There’s buyer qualification, financing, inspection and appraisal issues, not to mention home warranties, which buyers really should get, and the disclosures that are important to protect both parties. Miss one disclosure and it could come back to haunt you.

A prospective client in Provo related her story to me on that issue. They were sued because they had missed a disclosure related to a heating issue. But it wasn’t the buyer of their property who sued them, and won. It was the person who bought the property from the one they sold it to several years earlier.

Selling a home is a full-time job. And sellers need every advantage they can get. Uninitiated sellers don’t realize the complexity of all the tasks or their timing.

Marketing is a major issue. Do-it-yourself sellers have less than 20 percent of the market. Sure, they can put their home in an online classified ad website or in the newspaper but those websites list only a few thousand homes nationally, while the chief website Realtors use, www.realtor.com, lists more than 4 million.

So why sell your own home? To save money is usually the response at first blush. Yet Realtors often pay their own way because they get more for the home than a typical do-it-yourselfer.

Here’s what NAR research found out: “The median selling price of an open-market FSBO home was $140,300, while the median price for all agent-assisted sales was $215,000. The median income of unassisted sellers was $82,500, in contrast with $105,400 for agent-assisted sellers. Unassisted sellers were much more likely to be selling a somewhat smaller home, and they were more likely to be in a central/urban area.”

Here’s another thought. It’s the buyer, not the seller who pays the commission. Buyers pay it when they finance the purchase. Sellers collect it. Title companies disperse it.

Moreover, real estate agents save you time because they can expose homes to more buyers. Audience size matters when you want to get the most for anything you’re selling.. They also save you time by pricing your home correctly and marketing it efficiently. And they can screen buyers financially before letting them onto your property. Now, that’s something to consider.

 Rodger L. Hardy is a Realtor affiliated with Prudential Utah Real Estate and a former real estate editor. For answers to your real estate questions please email him at rhardy@utahresidentialEteam.com.