Can You Sell Your House Without An Agent?
You may be in a position where it’s time to sell your house. You may need a larger property due to an expanding family, or the opposite down sizing because you are an empty nester or a host of other reasons. Now you could be asking yourself or wondering if you can sell your house without an agent. The short answer is yes, and we are going to cover a few things in this article to help you do just that.
How To Sell Your House Yourself By Owner
There are some distinct advantages of selling your home yourself. The first and most obvious reason is the amount of money that you can potentially save yourself. It could be as much as 3 percent of your actually selling price. Simple math – if you sell your home for $100k, that’s 3K that you get to keep.
On For Sale By Owner’s website they wrote a great article about selling a property on your own:
How much money can a homeowner save by not using an agent?
If you cut out all agents—meaning post your own online ad, put out a yard sign, and sold your home on your own—you would essentially cut out on average about 6 percent of commission. On a $300,000 home, that’s about $18,000 of savings. There are some markets—and I believe Maine is one of them—where commissions run even higher, I believe 7.5 to 8 percent.Why wouldn’t a home seller need to use an agent?
The No. 1 reason that you don’t need an agent to sell your house is the rise of the Internet. The Internet has essentially changed the face of real estate. It’s essentially leveled the playing field across the market. The Internet allows sellers to easily market their homes to millions of people within minutes. Pricing information—recently sold homes, the competitive landscape of the homes that are being sold—is accessible within seconds on a search engine. Ten years ago, agents controlled all the information, and that’s why you had to go to them. Today, it’s a completely different ballgame.What about someone who has never sold a home before?
Again, with the Internet allowing access to information, companies like ours provide information and show sellers step-by-step instructions on how to sell your home. That information is easily readable. We provide it—and other services provide it—to bring that confidence to that person who has not done it.Read The Full Article “Selling a House Without an Agent” Here
Good info from them, however when they calculate saving 6% of your sales price, that is also assuming that the person buying your house doesn’t use a real estate agent either. We totally agree with them that because of the internet selling a property on your own is a whole lot easier these days.
Preparing To Sell By Owner
So what are some of the things that you need to be prepared for when getting ready to sell? Bank Rate put up an article that covers a few of the things that you need to think about before putting the for sale sign in the front yard:
1. Do I know the value of my home today?
A common mistake FSBO sellers make is pricing their home too high, leaving the property to languish on the market.
“When a home sits for a long while, buyers start to wonder what is wrong with it,” says Piper Nichole, author of “The For Sale By Owner Handbook.” “The best option is to come out of the gate priced right.”
To market a home competitively, sellers should research the final sale prices of similar properties in their community.
Real estate websites typically offer local sales trend information, selling prices for comparable homes (“comps”) in the community and the average length of time on the market. But these websites do not have all the data that a real estate agent has access to, so it might be worth asking a Realtor to perform a market analysis or hiring an appraiser.
Many real estate websites offering a quick estimate “are not doing a market analysis, they’re just writing an algorithm,” says Michael Seward, broker and owner of Michael Seward Real Estate.
2. Can I work with a buyer’s agent?
In a typical real estate transaction, you would hire an agent to list your home and you would pay a fee, traditionally about 6 percent of the purchase price, Nichole says. The buyer’s agent and seller’s agent often split the commission in half.
But if you’re selling on your own, sometimes you can offer a commission to the buyer’s agent to incentivize them to show your home. The commission is about 3 percent of the sales price. A buyer’s agent typically expects this, so not paying a commission could shrink your pool of potential buyers.
However, you should first learn about your state’s real estate laws so you don’t overpay the buyer’s agent or get stuck in a transaction that’s more harmful for you.
“It’s been my experience that a lot of real estate agents don’t know the laws or the code of ethics,” Seward says. “If you offer a commission to a buyer’s agent, familiarize self with state and local laws first.”
Read The Full Article “Should you sell your home without a real estate agent?” Here
Those are 2 really good points, with the first probably being the most important. You need to competitively price your property to make sure that you get a buyer in the time frame that you have to work with. Over pricing it could keep you from selling your house for a long time. Again, with the rise of the internet, this is much easier to do.
As far as working with a buyer’s agent, that’s usually not that hard to do, as long as you pay them. In Georgia it’s usually 3%.
In Conclusion
Yes, you can sell your house yourself without an agent. You will save some money by not using a realtor on your end, but your buyer may have a contract with a realtor and you will have to pay them. Make sure you price the home right and you should be able to sell your property in no time.
An easy way to sell your house yourself fast is to contact real estate investors who buy houses. You can always find them by performing a search on the web like “we buy houses” with your city at the end and you should find someone to buy your property fairly quickly. If you are in the Metro Atlanta area, we would like the opportunity to buy your house. You can reach us at (770) 756-8680.
