If you’re looking to sell your house or investment property in Katy without using a real estate agent, we can help come up with a strategy on how to price and market your house.
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, TX brokers and real estate agents can be very useful and earn their commission. Not always.
Key Points in This Article:
- Texas doesn’t require public disclosure of sale price of properties
- You can use HAR, Zillow and your local CAD to help you formulate an idea of how to price your house.
- Zillow, Facebook and Craigslist have free listing options to help you get your house in front of more people
- Working with a Cash Buyer like J&A Home Buyers may be a fast way to close quickly and bypass closing fees.
How Do I Sell My House Without An Agent in Katy?
There are a few ways to avoid paying high commissions in your TX sale.
First, there’s a tricky custom that you’ve gotta know about.
In most sales in Katy, roughly half of the commission you pay as the seller goes to pay for the buyer’s broker.
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. In Texas it is not required for a seller to report how much their house sold for which means it might be a little tricky for you to figure out what the comparable prices are for your property. Here are a few tips that may help you price your property.
Where to look when pricing– The best way to get an opinion is to ask a realtor who can give you a Comparable Market Analysis. We can send you one with data from your area for FREE, just fill out the form on this page or call us. Other places to look at houses for sale on Zillow and HAR. Keep in mind if there are no houses available near you that can mean there is low supply which may give you a bump in your house value. If there are a lot of houses available that gives you more data to price your house but you may need to watch how long the houses are listed before they go pending. If they are listed for more than 30-40 days they may be overpriced. Another place you can look is HCAD which is the Harris County Appraisal District. They are responsible for determining their opinion of the value of your property each year and this is how they send you a tax bill. It is not always accurate but take a look at your property and also any similar properties on your street that may have sold more recently than your property. This may help you determine where to start.
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. That should be extra money in YOUR pocket!
Sometimes in Katy, 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.
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 Katy.
Over 90% of transactions happen through the MLS – that’s the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). In Katy the main MLS is HAR.com. It’s the main database that all the brokers in Katy use to access information for their clients on the houses, condos, land and investment properties for sale, along with data on the sold prices.
Where to List your property– If you google houses for sale Houston it will be one of the top sites that you find. Sites like Zillow and Redfin will pull data from HAR as their main source of data. Currently there is no way to list your home on HAR without working with a licensed realtor to create the listing for you. So where do you go to get your house visible to other people with no cost to you? I am glad you asked! The top sites we recommend are:
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 Katy TX 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.
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.
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. It can feel a bit overwhelming to think about this but keep in mind that getting your property in front of more eyes will be key in finding the right buyer.
If you want to avoid paying any commissions, you can also sell your house to investors like us for CASH
We offer fair prices for properties – and we can close fast (in as little as 3-5 days if you need to).
Sometimes we’ll purchase Katy 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 TX.
Several of our team members are actually license realtors in Katy which means that we have access to all of the data you could want. We are here to serve you even if you just want a free data report and want to sell the house on your own. When you call us we can give you a cash offer along with a market report of what we think you could sell your house for. The report only takes us a few minutes to draw up.
We can close fast and pay cash in as little as just 3-5 days. Give us a call now at 281-219-8822 or fill out the short form over here.