Sometimes it is to keeping people from just walking up and ringing the doorbell. They may not want nosey (non-buyer pool) neighbors to know that the house in foreclosure, etc. The bank may be taking it over and the people still in the house are hostile. There could be renters living in the house that do not want to be disturbed. Sometimes the owner would rather the renters do not have direct contact with the possible buyers, because the renter could give away information they would rather not be known.

When purchasing our house, we learned some information from a talkative neighbor about the sellerâÂÂs timeline etc., that I am certain the seller would have preferred we had not learned. Although it did not change our negotiations in any real way, it was easy to see how that type of knowledge could have made a difference.

We're getting ready to put our house on the market so that is why we are looking at houses for sale near us and found these. Not sure about the one house, but the other house was just purchased a year ago and is listed $50K above last years selling price. The seller is supposedly a realtor, but has the house listed on a fsbo website and not the mls. I doubt either house is a foreclosure. The other house is more likely a job transfer since most home sales in the neighborhood are due to job transfers. It isn't a rental because we aren't allowed to have them.

Here, it is partly because many people do their preliminary house searches online, anyway. Also, some people do not want everyone who walks by or drives by (and who is Not in the market for a house) to know the house is for sale

If it is not on the MLS, could it be to keep the days on the market number from adding up? It may be for sale (SFBO), but they may be waiting to list it as a new listing on MLS when market conditions inprove.

Are signs prohibited by the HOA?

Some neighborhoods forbid the gins. But honestly, with the Internet, a sign isn't all that valuable of a marketing tool any longer.

A house in our neighborhood was fsbo last summer, but it never sold. It had a sign in the yard and a sign at the entrance to the subdivision. I recently saw the house on zillow as still fsbo, but I doubt it is because there hasn't been a sign since summer. I think for whatever reason zillow didn't pick up when they took it off the market.

"Sometimes it is to keeping people from just walking up and ringing the doorbell."

That would be my reason for not putting up a sign.

My guess is that the sellers want buyers to make an appointment.

All of the above. I have saved thousands by soliciting information from sellers agents usually if seller is desperate to sell for any reason.

Sometimes it can depend on the reason for the sale. If a family with young kids is moving due to falling on hard times or a divorce, they might not want a sign in the yard for the kids to see every day if they're upset about a pending move.

The "California buyer" guy is goofy. When I moved to the DC area from out of state, my wife came down and drove all over with our buyers agent looking at houses. The one we ended up buying was because my wife decided to have the agent drive down a street she found on the map that backed up onto a park. They only found the house because it had a for sale sign on it (the house is actually far enough back from the road to not be easily spotted).

You think that out of town buyers are going to send in bids sight unseen on MLS listings? Not likely.

we sold our first house in 1977 with no realtor sign
can't for the life of me tell you what our thinking was
we were 25 at the time, so there's no telling

we didn't want out of the neighborhood, we just wanted
a new house closer to our families.........

You might not think the California guy so goofy if you knew the local market. We were in a market with a shortage of houses and the locals were notoriously cheap. The house was on the MLS so out of towners would most likely see it on there. Since he didn't care to sell to locals, he didn't really want them to see it. I only found out because another neighbor told me about it. The neighbor who told me had been watching the listings.

You didn't read my post. The Californias may still be visiting town and driving around rather than relying on making sight-unseen bids on MLS listings.

The solution to low ball offers is to just outright decline them. I don't understand why that is a hard concept.

Those Californians you are talking about would never buy in my town, ronnatalie, because yard signs are not allowed where I live. And it's been that was for about 35 yrs.

Funny, as an ex out of stater, we bought here....how could that be with no signs??? How does anyone in my community sell a house?

ronnatalie, I understand what you are saying. What I'm saying is that my neighbor understood the local market well enough that he was willing to do something a bit different to attract what he considered a better buyer. His plan worked for him because he did sell it to someone from California and they bought at a higher price.

As a seller, I would prefer not to get the lowball buyers. Yes, I can say 'no', but at some point my realtor is going to want my house sold. I think you would start getting potential pressure from the realtor to sell.

I found out yesterday that the "no sign" fsbo house sold. Not sure at what price, but I'm sure it was above the usual going rate. I'm hoping it is able to be included as a comp when my house goes on the market next month.

We bought a house with no sign.
The sellers and the neighbors were all very close (annual cul-de-sac Labor Day picnic, Christmas party, Easter parade, etc) and they didn't want their friends to know they were moving until the moving truck pulled up.

Wow, c9pilot. "Surprise! We moved away." would not be under my list of how friends should behave. Maybe they didn't want to return all of the tools they borrowed over the years?

just kidding (with a hint of truth)

@Gyr_Falcon
Yeah, I thought it was weird, too. Good thing we were using an REA or we wouldn't have found it. What if one of the neighbors had other friends who wanted to move into their area and were waiting to see a sign go up?
These people were not tool people, however. They were "pick up the phone and call someone to fix it" people.

Here's a weird, completely irrelevant thing, though: we opened up the space under the stairs for a little extra storage. The HVAC return was under there, but we couldn't tell how the air got back to the unit in the garage, until we noticed a little corner flap of the barrier paper fluttering. We cut it open and WHOOSH the air conditioning suddenly worked terrifically for the first time in months. The builder had failed to cut away the opening.
We told our neighbor next door (whose A/C unit ran continuously) and he was able to "fix" his as well. The whole neighborhood then learned and fixed theirs!

That is amazing about the a/c, c9pilot. The installer didn't mess up by overlooking a step on one, but many of them! How long ago were they installed? It must have put quite a strain on the system, to say nothing about the additional energy usage..