If you’re looking to sell your house or investment property in Madison County without using a real estate agent, we can help.
Although we do cooperate with brokers, sometimes it’s best to avoid paying someone to be in the middle.
Paying 5-6% of the total sale price on a property can add up, which is why it can be beneficial to sell your house on your own (for sale by owner). In certain situations, AL brokers and real estate agents can be very useful and earn their commission. However, this is not always the case.
How Do I Sell My House Without An Agent in Madison County?
There are a few ways to avoid paying high commissions in your AL sale.
First, there’s a few things you need to know about the transaction in order to understand where those commissions and fees go.
In most sales in Madison County, roughly 50% of the commission you pay as the seller goes to pay for the buyer’s broker.
Doesn’t make much sense, right?
Why should you pay for the agent on the other side of the table?
Truthfully, it defies logic – it’s just what’s typically done.
You can use that to your advantage 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 – be aware that a savvy buyer may expect to take a discount too. If you’re doing the work of one agent, you can expect to save that money.
Sometimes in Madison County, AL, 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. Just don’t be surprised if it comes up during the negotiation.
You may want to consider offering 2.5% to buyer’s agents who will bring their clients to show your property. 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 Madison County.
Over 90% of transactions happen through the MLS – that’s the Multiple Listing Service. It’s the main database that all the brokers in Madison County use to access information for their clients on the houses, condos, land and investment properties for sale, along with data on the sold prices.
Once upon a time, you had to pay a full commission to get your property on the MLS. Now in Madison County, there are a few brokers who will charge you a fee just to list your property on the MLS. Often, you spend a few hundred bucks and you only pay a commission if the sale closes.
Compared to the cost of a newspaper ad, the MLS is a cheap way to market your property to a very wide audience.
All the major real estate search sites like Realtor.com, Zillow, Yahoo Homes, etc. get data from the MLS. Chances are good that when you submit your listing in Madison County 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’ve got packages 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 might or might not get an interested buyer to buy your property.
Advertising is a gamble. Sometimes open houses in Madison County, AL can be a great way to sell a property, and sometimes they’re a waste of time. Same with newspaper ads, craigslist postings, fancy signs – sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t.
To effectively sell your property on your own, you have to market it well.
Putting up fliers and signs around your neighborhood can generate some calls, and there’s a lot of free websites where you can post information. But often just putting up flyers and an open house isn’t 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 obviously, 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.
If you want to avoid paying any commissions, you can also sell your house to investors like us for CASH
We fair prices for properties – and we can close fast (in as little as 3-5 days if you need to).
The benefit of working with a company like LVL Home Solutions is that we deal with properties all the time. We understand what the worth of your home is/could be and know how to evaluate that quickly. Our team will be transparent with you, explain how the process works, and give you an honest evaluation if we are a good fit or not. We have turned potential clients away because they might be able to get more by listing on the market or we think that there might be a better course of action that they could take. We are not in this business to undercut the value of your home. If there is a deal to be made, we will give you an honest and fair amount that we can offer you, providing you with an unparalleled and transparent home buying process.
Sometimes we’ll purchase Madison County, AL 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, and a lot of other reasons, too – but we love to hear from people like you who are thinking of selling anywhere in AL.
We’re investors who care a lot about Madison County, AL.
We close fast and pay cash in as little as just 3-5 days. Give us a call now at (256) 834-3894 or fill out the short form over here.