How Do I Sell My House Without An Agent in Worcester?

If you’re looking to sell your house or investment property in Worcester without using a real estate agent, we can help.

Worcester residents with property they want to be rid of are learning of another option that doesn’t involve the expertise or expense of a real estate agent. A real estate agent is a middleman for a buyer and seller, and the six percent commission along with necessary repairs can get quite costly. While some of these agents and brokers are worth the charge, that’s not always the case.

If you have a home in Worcester, how can you sell a home without using a real estate agent or broker?

There are several options to circumvent the high commission on a Worcester home. One option is tricky but doable and can work in your favor if you play your cards just right. Keep in mind that many people go the route of selling the traditional way, paying a good chunk of change to a buyer’s broker.

Why pay realtor fees and spend time preparing your property when there are other options?

How Do I Sell My House Without An Agent in Worcester?

There are a few ways to avoid paying high commissions in your Massachusetts sale.

First, there’s a tricky custom that you’ve gotta know about.

In most sales in Worcester, 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.

When looking at comparable sales, make sure to factor in any commissions that were paid. If other properties like yours sold for prices that included commissions, you’ll want to take that into account.

Be careful not to under price your property, as some buyers may expect a discount if they’re not using an agent. If you’re handling the sale on your own, you can expect to save the money that would have gone to an agent.

In some cases, buyers who don’t have an agent may forget to negotiate the commission that the seller would normally pay their agent. If you don’t want to pay this commission, you don’t have to remind them, but be prepared for it to come up during negotiations.

Consider offering a 2.5% commission to agents who bring their clients to see your property. This may seem like a lot of money, but if you’ve factored it into the price of your property, you can always negotiate a better deal with buyers who don’t have 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 Worcester.

Over 90% of transactions happen through the MLS – that’s the Multiple Listing Service. It’s the main database that all the brokers in Worcester 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 Worcester, 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 a 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 Worcester 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 Worcester Massachusetts 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.

If you want to avoid paying any commissions, you can also sell your house to investors like us for CASH