Sell my house without a realtor? Here is the arithmetic.

Most people weighing whether to sell my house without a realtor want somebody to name a winner. Here's the honest version, and it isn't the one you'd expect from Property Seller Solutions, a company that buys houses. If your house is in reasonable shape, you can wait two or three months, and you don't mind strangers walking through it at weekends, listing with a realtor will usually leave you with more money than we can pay. That holds even after the commission comes out.

We say the same thing on the phone. About one seller in four takes our number, thinks it over, and lists instead. That's a fine outcome, and we'd rather have it than a seller who felt pushed.

Roughly nine sellers in ten still work with an agent, according to the National Association of Realtors' profile of home buyers and sellers. They aren't all making a mistake. A listing agent puts your house in front of every buyer in the county at once, and competition between buyers is what lifts a price. One cash buyer, however fair, can't manufacture that.

So where does a cash sale win

On three things a listing can't promise: the date, the condition, and the certainty.

A listed sale runs 60 to 120 days from the day the sign goes in to the day the money lands, and that's when nothing goes wrong. It assumes the house shows well enough to draw an offer, that the buyer's lender approves the loan, and that the appraisal comes in at the contract price. Any one of those can move the closing by a month or end it outright.

We pay cash, so there's no lender and no appraisal contingency. The date you choose is the date written into the contract: 7 days if you need it done, or 60 if you need time to find somewhere to go.

Compare net proceeds, never the list price

This is where the comparison usually goes wrong. The figure on the sign is not the figure that reaches your account. To put the two roads side by side honestly, start with a realistic sale price for your house repaired, then take out:

• Commission, still commonly 5% to 6% of the sale price across both sides, though since 2024 the buyer's agent share is negotiated separately rather than assumed
• Closing costs on your side, usually 1% to 3%
• The repairs and credits a buyer's inspector asks for, which on an older house is rarely nothing
• Three months of mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance and utilities while the house sits

What's left is your net proceeds from listing. That is the number to hold our offer against, and once both figures are written down, the choice between us and an agent stops being a matter of opinion. Our page on what a cash offer contains and how to test it works the same sums the other way round.

The cash buyer vs realtor question is easier to answer once you've seen both processes end to end, so here they are, from the first phone call to the day the money lands.

Listing with a realtor

You'll interview two or three agents and pick one. They'll suggest a price from recent sales nearby, then a list of things to do before the photographs: paint, carpet, decluttering, a deep clean, the light fitting in the hallway. Some of that you can do yourself. Some of it costs real money up front, months before any arrives back.

Then the house goes live. Showings are booked at other people's convenience, including evenings and weekends, and every one of them means leaving the house clean and leaving it empty for an hour. An open house or two follows.

When an offer comes in, your listing agent negotiates it. Then the buyer's inspector spends three hours finding everything the house has ever done wrong, and a second negotiation starts over who pays for it. The lender orders an appraisal. If it comes in low, the price is renegotiated a third time or the buyer walks. From accepted offer to closing is usually 30 to 45 days on top of the time the house spent on the market, and the commission comes out of your proceeds on the last day.

Done well, on the right house, that process finds the highest bidder in the county. That's exactly what it's for.

Selling to a cash buyer

One phone call, two minutes: the address, the condition, your timing. One walkthrough, and nobody cares what state the house is in. A written offer inside 24 hours, with the three figures behind it set out so you can argue with any of them.

If you say yes, we take the contract to a Utah title company. They run the title search, settle any mortgage, lien or back taxes out of the price at closing, and wire you what's left on the date you picked. There's no commission, no closing costs on your side, and no fee at any point. You leave the furniture, the garage and the boxes in the basement. The whole sequence, step by step, is on our sell my house fast page.

What you give up for that is the last few percent of the price. That's the trade, and it's the only one. It is also the whole cost of choosing to sell my house without a realtor on this road rather than the other one.

Is this you?

A cash sale tends to be the better road when one of these is true:

• The house needs more work than you can pay for before it could be listed
• There's a date attached: a foreclosure sale, a closing on the next house, a job that starts in another state
• You're settling an estate from out of town and can't manage showings from three hours away
• There's a tenant in place, or somebody living there who won't be leaving for viewings
• A divorce, an illness or a move into care means the sale can't take three months
• The house is vacant and the carrying costs are the thing hurting you

If none of those describe you, list it. If you're weighing up doing it yourself instead, the arithmetic changes again, and we've laid it out on cash buyer vs FSBO. If you'd rather compare a few cash buyers before you compare us to an agent at all, the questions to ask are on companies that buy houses.

We've bought 1,300+ houses in Utah since 2016, hold an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, and average 4.9 across 520 Google reviews. Someone answers the phone at (385) 503-4333 from 8am to 7pm, seven days a week, and telling you to list is a normal end to that call. When you want a number to hold the arithmetic against, get your cash offer and we'll call you back within one business day.