What phone number do I put on my FSBO listing?

What your listing shows, and who is reading it

Read the posting form before you fill it in. Zillow and Redfin attach a contact route to a for-sale-by-owner listing: sometimes your phone number in plain text, sometimes a form or an in-app message that reaches you without showing it. Craigslist masks your email behind a relay and leaves the body of the ad alone, so anything you type in the description, a number included, is public. Facebook Marketplace keeps everything in chat until you hand out a number yourself.

If the site has a relay and every buyer you want will use it, the phone field can stay empty. That is the free answer and it is a good one. It stops being enough the moment somebody sees a yard sign, a printed flyer, or a screenshot of the listing forwarded by a friend, because none of those people are inside the app.

The other half of the question is who else is reading. A new FSBO listing is not read only by buyers: agents watch the feed for owners to convert into clients, wholesalers watch it for a property below market, and lead brokers resell whatever contact details the page leaves machine-readable.

What sellers say arrives in the first day

• Agent calls. Sellers report the first ones inside a few hours of the listing going live, and they keep coming for weeks. Most are a straight pitch to list with them instead.
• The commission call. Sellers on FSBO forums report agents ringing to ask whether you will pay a buyer-agent commission, usually 3%, before they bring anybody to see the house. It is a fair question and a sales call in the same breath, and it arrives again with every new agent who finds the listing.
• "Cash buyer" texts. Short, unsigned, often an offer without a viewing, sometimes with a link or a push to move the conversation to another app. Some senders are real investors. Some are the opening move of a scam.
• The six-digit code request. Somebody asks you to read back a code to "prove you are a real seller". The code is a verification code for an account being opened in your name. Never read one out to a stranger.
• Traffic that outlives the sale. Cached copies sit in search results, screenshots circulate, and a printed flyer stays pinned to a board for months. The listing comes down; the number on it does not.
• None of that is an argument against selling your own house. It is an argument for putting a number on the listing that you can switch off the week it closes.

The free options, described fairly

• Your own cell. Free, instant, and already in your pocket. It is also the number your bank, your kids’ school, and everyone you know has, and it is now on a public page that gets scraped. There is no undo. You can block callers one at a time, and that is the whole toolkit.
• A Google Voice number. Free, United States only, and the most complete free option available: it takes calls, takes texts, does voicemail with transcripts, and rings your phone through an app. You need a Google account and a U.S. phone number to link to it, and the number sits inside your Google identity, the same account as your mail and photos. If what you want is a free number that answers calls, look at this one first.
• The listing site’s own relay. Zillow, Redfin, and most FSBO platforms have some form of in-app messaging, it costs nothing, and it never shows your number. The limit is reach: only people browsing that site can use it.
• A cheap prepaid SIM. It works, it answers calls, and it costs a plan every month. It is one number for one person, which matters when two of you are selling the house together.

A LocalRing number, and what it will not do

It is a U.S. number local to the ZIP code you enter, and you put it in the listing. Texts to it arrive by email, in up to five inboxes at once, so one listing can be answered by both of you with no shared login and no second account. Reply from your email and it goes back to the sender as an SMS from the listing number. No app, no second SIM.

Calls are the limit, and it is worth saying twice. A U.S. number here does not forward calls to your phone. A caller hears a short spoken message asking them to text, and nothing rings. If taking calls matters to you, Google Voice or a prepaid SIM is the better answer, and we would rather you knew that before paying us anything.

It is receive-first. You can reply to anybody who has texted you in the last 30 days, and you cannot text somebody first. A buyer who went quiet a month ago has to text again before you can answer. There are no picture messages, no voicemail, and the number cannot be moved to your own carrier later. It is rented for the length of the sale, not bought.

Passes run from C$2.99: C$2.99 for a day, C$5.99 for three days, or C$7.99 for a week, and Monthly is C$14.99 a month, with the first 14 days free with a card at checkout, if the listing runs longer. Prices in Canadian dollars. Your card issuer converts the charge and may add a foreign transaction fee.

When a pass ends, forwarding stops. Monthly does not end on its own: after closing you cancel it, and the next renewal does not happen. Either way the number is held for you for seven more days, then retired or reassigned. A text sent to it after that is not delivered to anyone. That is the point of it: the number on a closed listing stops being yours.

What to write in the listing

• Name the channel in the ad itself: "Text only, please: (312) 555-0100." A buyer who was told to text will text.
• Put it in the description as well as the phone field. Some sites show one and not the other, and a flyer or a sign shows neither.
• Say what the property is on the same line — "3BR on Elm St, text only" — so a message three weeks later still makes sense.
• Leave your email off the page. It is easier to scrape than a number, and it connects to the rest of your accounts.

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