If you’re looking to sell your house or investment property in Fort Wayne 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.
After all, paying 5-6% of the sale of a property in a commission is a lot of money. In certain situations, IN brokers and real estate agents can be very useful and earn their commission. Other times, you may want to try to sell your home on your own, and save yourself some money. This is an article on how to sell your house without an agent.
How Do I Sell My House Without An Agent in Fort Wayne?
There are a few ways to avoid paying high commissions in your IN sale. Most people don’t know about these helpful tricks.
First, there’s a tricky custom that you’ve gotta know about.
In most sales in Fort Wayne, roughly half 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? Shouldn’t they pay for their broker?
Truthfully, it defies logic – it’s just what’s typically done. Sometimes what’s common does defy logic, like jeering at sports players on the television.
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 under price your property – Most buyers won’t give you full asking price. Everyone wants a discount. Under pricing your property may also raise red flags to buyers, leading to questions like “what’s wrong with the property?”. This may deter buyers, making your property less than perfect.
Sometimes in Fort Wayne, 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. Be sly, be stealthy and don’t remind them.
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 Fort Wayne.
Over 90% of transactions happen through the MLS – that’s the Multiple Listing Service. It’s the main database that all the brokers in Fort Wayne 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 Fort Wayne, 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. This is simple, so if it doesn’t sell, you don’t pay.
Compared to the cost of a newspaper ad, the MLS is a cheap way to market your property to a very wide audience. This is helpful, as when your house is on the MLS, it reaches more buyers, making the possibility that you sell your house that much more likely.
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 Fort Wayne to the MLS, information on your property will end up on most of the major sites within a few days. Buyers will come by, looking at your house, and you will get publicity.
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 Fort Wayne IN 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. It’s a gamble, but it has to be one that you are willing to make if you want to sell your house.
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. Put work in, get work out from the buyers.
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. Even so, having an agent can be more than expensive.
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). This is a growing practice and we will work to find out a fair price for your house.
Sometimes we’ll purchase Fort Wayne 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 IN.
We’re investors who care a lot about Fort Wayne.
We close fast and pay cash in as little as just 3-5 days. Give us a call now at (260) 220-8715 or fill out the short form over here.