There’s always something to howl about.

Has real estate reality taken all the fizz out of FSBOs?

It’s been fun dealing with years-old academic studies of the real estate market insisting that For-Sale-By-Owner marketing is just as good as listing with a Realtor.

It might have been, during the boom, when any idiot could sell a house. But it’s been kind of sad to watch people in our current declining market trying to sell by themselves — or trying to sell with the Help-U-Fail style of discounters — or trying to sell with the usual crew of spelling-impaired white shoe Realtors.

For owner-occupants clinging to the last of their equity, there is no substitute in this market for actual real estate marketing. The white shoe boys will shine you on, and the rape-and-run guys will beat you up on price once a week, but to actually sell a premium-quality home at a premium price, somebody has to make a sales effort.

This is what FSBOs normally do worst, of course. Even the typically-clueless rain-dancing Realtor at least gets the basics right, when many by-owner sellers are busy finding unique and original ways to get in their own way.

But the market tells, doesn’t it? A short bit in Fortune hints that the fizz may be gone from the FSBO highball:

“I used to get a phone call a day from people interested in FSBO Web sites,” Zwiefelhofer says. “Now it’s maybe one call a week.”

So were FSBO sites just flashes in the pan? Murray says that with properties harder to sell these days, sellers are returning to brokers for professional marketing help, causing the unassisted slice of the market to slip to around 15%. But he expects the FSBO market to bounce back – eventually.

Not all by-owner sellers stink at the job. BloodhoundBlog Contributor Richard Riccelli is scary-good at marketing his own properties — witness 214Calhoun.com — and here in Phoenix, the people most likely to adopt our style of listing tactics are FSBOs — a sad commentary on the so-called “professionals.”

But in a market where even well-prepared, well-priced, well-promoted homes are taking a long time to sell, doing everything you can to make things hard on buyers is obviously a sub-optimal strategy. How obvious? So inescapably clear that only a college professor could miss it.

All that said, here’s a spooky thought: I keep hearing gossip that FHA buyers for by-owner properties are going to have to spring for two appraisals. That smells so much like the NAR that I find it entirely too plausible. If I’ve gotten this wrong, I’d be grateful for correction.

Technorati Tags: , ,