REAL ESTATE : Do-It-Yourself Seller Finds He Can’t Get Job Done in Tight Market

A month after vowing to sell his 3,300-square-foot North Tustin home himself when six months of listing the property with area realtors failed to produce a single offer, a chastened Robert Gallas has hauled down his homemade sale sign.

In its place hangs a professional realty chain’s distinctive signboard.

Gallas, who figured a bit of creative marketing would work where nothing else had, has discovered that--at least in his circumstances--it takes more than a publicized offer to pare $5,000 a week from the selling price to create shopper interest in the county’s painfully slow residential real estate market.

In four weeks of effort--during which he ran newspaper ads to promote his weekly price reductions--Gallas rarely saw a prospect.

The dearth of customers convinced the self-employed financial analyst that most home shoppers use real estate agents who aren’t eager to show a home that is up for sale by owner.

Since signing on with a big firm and boosting the commission he’s prepared to pay on the $469,900 asking price to 7%--effectively promising a $5,000 bonus to the agent that brings him a buyer--Gallas said he’s had dozens of people come through.

“On Sunday, there were six families looking at the house at the same time,” he said--and that’s after he raised the price back up from the $420,000 he was asking at the end of his stint as a do-it-yourself seller.

No one has made an offer yet, but that isn’t because of the price.

“I’ve had several people say they love the place and would make an offer--if they knew they could sell their home,” Gallas said.

And with that, of course, he touched on a major conundrum of the current real estate slump: a sizable portion of homes on the market in Orange County are priced so high that the only people who can raise the necessary cash are those who can sell their existing homes, which are priced so that the only people who can afford them are those who can sell their homes.

It is a chain that holds together when everyone has money to burn but breaks up rapidly when the economic screws tighten down, as they have in the past six months.