What’s Involved in Selling My Home Myself?

If you’ve been watching the property market and decided that now is the right time to sell your home, then statistically speaking, one of the first things you’re going to do is look for a real estate agent to represent you. We discuss this process in our free educational guide to selling property, called Selling Your Property: What You Really Need to Know, which you can download by simply subscribing to our website.

As you start to meet with agents in your local area, you’ll no doubt ask them about their fees and commissions, which, aside from marketing and advertising costs, is the largest expense associated with selling your home.

Real Estate Agent Fees and Commissions

Depending on where in Australia you live, you can expect to pay, on average, as little as 2.07 percent (South Australia) or as much as 3.26 percent (Tasmania) in agent commissions; the national average is 2.41 percent.

For a property valued at $500,000, that’s more than $12,000 (excluding GST), going straight to your agent, plus all the other expenses — advertising and marketing, conveyancing fees, the cost of any home maintenance or repairs, etc — all of which can make a put a serious dent in your bottom line. It’s easy to see why, then, some homeowners opt to go it alone, without a real estate agent.

Selling Your Property By Yourself (For Sale By Owner)

In recent years, a number of services have been introduced to the Australian marketplace to enable homeowners to sell their homes without a real estate agent. Among them, For Sale By Owner, BuyMyPlace, Agent In a Box, Minus The Agent, and No Agent Property each promise vendor savings of up to $10,000.

For a relatively small fee (usually a few hundred dollars) services like For Sale By Owner provide vendors with access to real estate photography, printable sales collateral, listings on Domain and realestate.com.au (as well as a number of other property websites), signboards, and so forth.

Placing the Vendor in Control

Under the For Sale By Owner model, as the vendor, you control the entire sales process, as opposed to leaving it in the hands of a real estate agent. You choose the sales method, the marketing campaign, arrange and attend inspections, follow up on buyer enquiry, and so on.

If you’ve bought and sold lots of property before, selling your home privately might be another way to go. Of course, you should thoroughly research how to sell property in Australia, as well as your local market, and legal obligations, before making any decisions.

To determine if selling your home privately will work for you, take a look at how people in your local area are selling their homes, and take note of the marketing and advertising campaigns they’re using. Ask friends or family who have recently bought how they found out about their new property, and the methods they used, as buyers, to find properties.

Lastly, subscribe to receive access to our free educational guide to selling property in Australia, called Selling Your Property: What You Really Need to Know, which takes you through each step of the sales process — from finding an agent (if you intend to use one) right through to arranging and finalising settlement. Alternatively, for more property market news, insights and analysis, continue reading our blog.