Are you wondering how to sell a house without a real estate agent in Los Angeles (and beyond)? If you’re looking to sell your home (or investment property) in LA without using a realtor, 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, LA brokers and real estate agents can be very useful and earn their commission. But not always. So you might think about selling your house without an agent!
A few ways to avoid paying high commissions in your Los Angeles home sale.
It’s important to know about the requirements for selling your house without a realtor, but there’s a tricky custom that you have to know about.
With most home sales in Los Angeles, roughly half of the commission you pay as the seller goes to pay for the buyer’s broker.
That doesn’t make sense! Why should you pay a commission to the agent on the other side of the table? Truthfully, it defies logic, but that’s what’s typically done. The good news is that you can use that situation to your advantage in a few ways.
- 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 Los Angeles 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!
- 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 Los Angeles.
Remember! Over 90% of transactions happen through the MLS – that’s the Multiple Listing Service. It’s the main database that all the brokers in Los Angeles 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 Los Angeles, 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 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 Los Angeles 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 Los Angeles California can be a great way to sell 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 house on your own, you also 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 commissions, you can sell your house to investors (like us) for CASH.
How to sell your house without a real estate agent in Los Angeles? Sell it to us!
We fair prices for properties – and we can close fast (in as little as 3-5 days if you need to). Above all, we buy houses for cash, as-is, and are ready to close in as early as you want or in the timeline you’re most comfortable with.
We understand that many sellers need to sell their property for cash for one or a combination of reasons, be it to fund their children’s education, treat an ailing relative, or simply to relocate to a different city or state.
No matter what your motivation, we understand your urgency.
We’re committed to helping you resolve your financial problems by buying your house FAST and for CASH.
When selling through an agent, you don’t know for long your property may be listed on the market before you find a prospective buyer and even if you do, they may not even qualify for a mortgage. However, when you sell your house to us, you will get a quick cash offer.
We always have cash to buy houses. That’s what we do. And you don’t have to pay exorbitant realtor commissions, which helps to save a lot of money.
Sometimes we’ll purchase Los Angeles 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 there are a lot of other reasons too, but we love to hear from people who are thinking of selling anywhere in the California including Orange County and Long Beach.
We’re real estate investors who care a lot about Los Angeles and Southern California as a whole!
Again, we can close fast and pay cash in as little as just 3-5 days. So maybe it’s time to stop thinking “How do I sell a house without a realtor in LA?” Instead, give us a call, (310) 928-9688 or fill out the short form here.
