How Much Does It Cost To Sell A House?

Karin Carr, REALTOR®
Published on August 13, 2018

Video transcription below

How much does it cost to sell a house? Well, that’s what we’re talking about today and we are starting right now.

Hey everyone welcome back to my channel. My name is Karin Carr and I’m a Realtor in Savannah, Georgia with Keller Williams Coastal Area Partners. If this is your first time visiting my channel, go ahead and hit the subscribe button and click that little bell for notifications because you know, you’re awesome and I’m awesome so let’s be awesome together.

How much does it cost to sell a house? Assuming that you are going to hire a real estate agent these are the typical expenses that you are going to incur.

Number one

You’re going to pay the commission to the real estate agents involved in the transaction. You hire an agent and you agree to pay them X percentage of the sales price of the house. When the buyer comes along if they are represented by a different agent, your agent pays that person.  When you’re asking yourself, how much does it cost to sell a house, that’s probably the first thing you think of.

Now I’ve done a whole lot of videos about where the commission goes. If you’re interested, click here, but just know that we do not keep the whole thing ourselves. We are splitting it with the other agent, we are splitting it with our brokerage, and we are paying all of the marketing expenses so don’t go thinking that we’re all millionaires because that’s not really how it works.

How Much Does It Cost To Sell A House?

Number two

You will have to pay the property taxes for the time that you lived in the house. After the property changes hand the buyer will pay that. If you’ve already paid your property taxes for the whole year then from the date of your closing to the end of the fiscal year you’re going to actually get a rebate because you’ve already paid those property taxes and the buyer should be paying them so you’ll get the money back.

In the Georgia market, it’s very common that buyers to ask you to pay their closing costs or at least a portion of them. We have a lot of first-time buyers and nobody puts 20% down anymore. I mean, people don’t have $100,000 just sitting in the bank waiting to buy a house as a general rule. They may ask you, hey can you chip in $3,000 towards my closing costs? They will probably also ask you for either a home warranty, a termite bond, or both.

As you know, living in Georgia there are two types of houses, those that have termites and those that don’t have termites yet. We typically like to have some sort of pest control plan on our homes so that that doesn’t happen. When the buyer comes along they’ll say hey, I want you to transfer that termite bond to me so that I can live in the house for the first year and not worry that the house has termites or is going to have termites very soon.

How Much Does It Cost To Sell A House?

Let’s say the buyer moves in and the first Thanksgiving that they have all their family come to visit the stove breaks. Yes, this actually happened to one of my clients. The home warranty company comes, and if they can’t repair the stove they buy a new stove. It’s a great thing for the buyer to make sure that they’re not going to have any unforeseen major expenses the first year that they live in the house. A home warranty is typically somewhere around $500.

Now if you decide to sell your house for sale owner you will not be paying the real estate agent’s commission. Instead, you’re going to be paying for all of the marketing of your home. Just sticking a for sale by owner sign in your front yard is probably not going to get the job done. The people that buy for sale by owners are looking for a great deal so they’re going to come and offer you far less than the actual market value of your house, as a typical rule.

You’re going to be paying for the photographer, for the video, for the drone photography, and for all advertising. You’re going to have to put a nice sign in the yard, you’re going to have to show the property every time somebody calls you to make an appointment. The money that you save in the commission you’re going to be incurring a lot of it with additional cost in marketing and in time where it’s going to be all on you. You don’t have an agent who’s doing all this stuff for you.

Now you know how much it costs to sell a house, but do you know what your home is valued at? Do you know what your market value is? It’s not enough to just say oh the house down the street sold for blah blah blah because half the time that number is not really accurate. Your neighbor might tell you, oh we sold it for $300,000 but they actually sold it for 289. Just saying. Sometimes people have the tendency to exaggerate just a little bit.

If you’d like to find out what your home is worth because you’re thinking of selling in the next six months or so click this link. We would be happy to do a free no obligation home evaluation analysis for you so that you can really sit down and say okay if I sold how much money could I expect to make? Because that’s a big factor in deciding if is now the right time to sell or if should I wait a year or two.

Thank you so much for watching and I will see you at the next one.

Now you know how much it takes … There are two types of houses, those that don’t have termites now and those that have.

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