If the above were true, some real estate agents would never sell a house.
The real deal on selling a house:
- Shy people sell their own homes every day. You can enlist friends or family members to host the Open House, hire kids to pass out flyers in the supermarket parking lot.
- Organized is good, but most people can focus on selling one house. The issue is time, if your job leaves you zero time, and you work on weekends, you need a real estate agent.
- Real estate contracts appear complicated, but the basics are simple. Get copies of a sales contract and a disclosure statement and READ them. See our pages on contracts, disclosures, and settlement statements for a tutorial. Purchase blank copies at Staples, Office Depot, Office Max, or support our web-site and get them from our set of Forms & Contracts. (you can now download them to your computer)
- Fill out a blank sales contract and you will never again see it as complicated.
- In most circumstances you can sell a home without a lawyer, but we recommend one. At $350 to $600, or even $750, a good real estate lawyer is cheap compared to a real estate agent's $7,000 fee (on a $100,000 house). We recommend a lawyer for the following services:
- Acting as Escrow Agent to hold a down payment, binder, or earnest money deposit.
- Providing legal advice of the type offered by real estate agents.
- Hosting and handling the Closing, or representing you if the Closing is to be handled by the lending institution's lawyer. (In states where a Title Company or Escrow Agent handles closing functions, the need for a lawyer is diminished, but in our opinion, still a good investment at the $400 level. )
- You should get a discount for documents you prepare and fill out versus those the lawyer has to prepare.
- If the lawyer's fee seems high, find another lawyer.
- Find lawyers at Lawyers.com or American Bar Association.
- Local mortgage brokers are more than happy to offer free advice on real estate mortgages, plus web-sites like Ditech and QuickenMortgage offer more choices than the average real estate agent can provide.
- Audrie.com can be your marketing and advertising consultant. See our Seller's checklist for a road map to selling your own home.
 Levels of Motivation
- A savings of $14,000 on a $200,000 house is big incentive to avoid real estate commissions, but not for everyone.
A person who paid $140,000 for a house selling for $200,000 today, might shrug off the $14,000 real estate commission: "... let a realtor handle the messy details."
- But if you paid $194,000 for that $200,000 house... those details don't look so "messy." Welcome to the world of low inflation and low appreciation.
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