Are you thinking about selling your house or investment property in Louisville without using a real estate agent? If the answer is yes, we can help.
Although we do cooperate with brokers, it can be beneficial to avoid paying a middleman.
After all, paying 5-6% of the sale of a property in commission is a lot of money not in your pocket. In certain situations, KY brokers and real estate agents can be very useful and earn their commission, but not always.
How Do I Sell My House Without An Agent?
There are a few ways to avoid paying high commissions in your sale.
First, there’s a tricky custom that you should know about: In most sales in Louisville, the seller pays for the buyer’s broker as well as their own.
Doesn’t make much sense, right?
Why should you pay for the agent on the other side of the table?
To many investors, it defies logic — it’s just the way it’s always been done.
You can make the most of that custom in a few ways.
First, factor in the commissions paid when you’re looking at the comparable sales. If the properties similar to yours sold for prices that included commissions, take that into account.
Don’t underprice your property — consider that a savvy buyer may expect to negotiate a discount too. If you’re doing the work of one agent, you can expect to save at least that commission.
Sometimes in Louisville, buyers who aren’t represented by an agent won’t remember to negotiate the buyer’s side commission out of the price for themselves, so don’t remind them if you don’t want to pay them.
Getting Potential Buyers to Your Property
You may want to consider offering 2.5% to buyer’s agents to show your property to their clients. Sure, it’s a lot of money. If you’re pricing your property including that commission, you can always negotiate a better deal for a purchaser who comes without an agent.
On the other hand, if you don’t leave room for the buyer’s agent’s commission, you’ll be excluding most of the buyers in the market in Louisville.
Over 90% of transactions happen through the MLS — that’s the Multiple Listing Service. It’s the main database that all the brokers in Louisville, and elsewhere, use to access information for their clients on the houses, condos, land and investment properties for sale, along with data on the sold prices.
Compared to the cost of a newspaper ad, the MLS is a cheap way to market your property to a very wide audience. Often, you spend a few hundred bucks and you only pay a commission if the sale closes.
All the major real estate search sites, including Realtor.com, Zillow and Yahoo Homes, get data from the MLS. When you submit your listing in Louisville or surrounding areas to the MLS, information on your property will end up on most of the major sites within a few days.
Each of those sites sells ads. They offer package deals that let you pay to enhance your listing, feature it at the top of the search, and a lot of other bells and whistles that may or may not get an interested buyer to buy your property.
Advertising is a gamble. Sometimes open houses in Louisville, KY can be a great way to sell a property, and sometimes they just don’t work. Same with newspaper ads, Craigslist postings and fancy signs; sometimes they work, and sometimes they are a waste of time and money.
Market Your Property
Putting up fliers and signs around your neighborhood can generate some calls, and there are a lot of free websites where you can post information. But often just putting up fliers and holding an open house won’t be enough if your house doesn’t appeal to the average home buyer.
In theory, real estate agents charge big commissions because they have to spend a lot of money up front to advertise your property. By advertising lots of properties at once, they expect to get more phone calls. And of course, they’ll make good profits by selling lots of houses.
Certain properties might require thousands of dollars in advertising expenses before the right buyer happens to see the ad and call.
Altogether, acting as your own realtor in order to avoid commissions can result in a huge waste of your time, effort and money. And, you may or may not be successful in the actual sale of your house. Of course, there is an alternative.
How We Can Help
If you want to avoid paying any commissions, you can also sell your house to investors like us for CASH.
We offer fair prices for properties that don’t include commissions — and we can close fast (in as little as 3-5 days if you need to).
Sometimes we’ll purchase Louisville houses, fix them up, then rent them out… sometimes we’ll fix them up and sell them to other people looking for great homes in the area. We love to hear from people like you who are thinking of selling anywhere in KY.
Daniel and Catherine Close, the team for We Buy Houses in Kentucky, will review your home and offer cash for houses, with no commission charge, in Louisville, Kentucky and surrounding areas, including: Bardstown, Fern Creek, Highview, Jeffersontown, La Grange, Lyndon, Mount Washington, Newburg, Okolona, Shelbyville, Shepherdsville, Shively, St. Matthews, Taylorsville and Valley Station. We also buy homes in Southern Indiana, including Clarksville, Jeffersonville and New Albany.
We’re investors who care a lot about Louisville.
We close fast and pay cash in as little as just 3-5 days. We don’t take out commissions, so you get a fair deal for your home. Give us a call now at (502) 383-1484 or fill out the short form over here.
