If you’re looking to sell your house or investment property in the IE 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. Especially when they are unnecessary and not required for the transaction.
After all, paying 5-6% of the sale of a property in a commission is a lot of money. In certain situations, California brokers and real estate agents can be very useful and earn their commission. Not always.
How Do I Sell My House Without An Agent in the IE?
There are a few ways to avoid paying high commissions in your California sale.
First, there’s a tricky custom that you’ve gotta know about.
In most sales in the IE, roughly half of the commission you pay as the seller goes to pay for the buyer’s broker. It can feel odd that the home seller has to pay both the buyer and sellers agent commissions.
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. The agents commissions are 6%, and title fees, escrow fees, closing costs are typically 2%. You can easily multiply the sales price of the property by 0.92 in order to get a realistic amount of take home from the sale. This does not include any seller credits that the buyer may ask for.
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 the Inland Empire, 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. Also, a buyer without an agent can be dual represented by your agent which can lead to a conflict of interest if the agent shows obvious favoritism to that buyer. Your selling agent would be able to potentially make the commission on both ends of that transaction.
You should always leave room for the buyers agent brokerage in order to include buyers agents that may have access to the right buyer for your property. If you price the buyers agent brokerage commission too low, you may be excluding a majority of buyers in the IE.
Over 90% of transactions happen through the MLS – that’s the Multiple Listing Service. It’s the main database that all the brokers throughout the United States 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 The Inland Empire, 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 The Inland Empire to the MLS, information on your property will end up on most of the major sites within a few days. These sites can also help sell the property because they are considered windows into the MLS and make it easy for potential buyers to view your property listing without needing access to the MLS database which is almost exclusively used by realtors.
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 the The Inland Empire California 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. You will have to test a few of these avenues and see if there is any success before deciding on one or two indefinitely.
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. You have to put yourself in the mind of a potential home buyer in the Inland Empire and think what you would search or where you would go to find a potential property.
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. The more houses they sell, the more of a return on investment they get from their marketing efforts.
Certain properties might require thousands of dollars in advertising expenses before the right buyer happens to see the ad and call. Most marketing is a trial and error process which requires time and effort.
If you want to avoid paying any commissions, you can also sell your house to investors like us for CASH
We pay fair prices for properties – and we can close fast (in as little as 3-5 days if you need to). This is up to you and your timeline because we will conveniently let you pick the day you would like to close and we will make it happen.
Sometimes we’ll purchase The Inland Empire 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 California.
We’re investors who care a lot about the Inland Empire and we pride ourselves on improving the neighborhoods and helping home sellers in any way that we can.
We close fast and pay cash in as little as just 3-5 days. Give us a call now at (877) 452-0055 or fill out the short form over here.