Sell Your Own House--We Did It!

We recently listed our house for sale without using a real estate agent to assist us. Instead we hired an attorney to process the paperwork and to coordinate the transfer of the property from us to the new owner. We also contracted a limited-services real-estate company to list our house in the multiple-listing service that is used by real-estate professionals. Although, we are not using a real-estate agent to represent us, we are cooperating with real-estate agents who bring prospective buyers to us, meaning that we will pay a commission if their client buys our house. However, by doing this, we are only paying one-half the usual commission fee that is generally paid by sellers. The industry standard commission is six percent. By eliminating (great word) a real-estate agent to represent us, the maximum commission we would pay is three percent of the selling price. Costs To list our house on the multiple-listing service, which only Realtors