What Americans Get Wrong About Selling a Home Without an Agent

When the National Association of Realtors settled its big commission lawsuit in 2024, a lot of American homeowners ran the numbers for the first time. The settlement meant a seller no longer had to advertise a fixed fee for the buyer's agent. So the obvious question followed: if that side of the commission is now negotiable, why hand a listing agent five or six percent at all?

Fair question. Also, as it turns out, a fairly parochial one.

Selling your own home is legal in every US state, and since August 2024 you decide openly whether and how to pay a buyer's agent rather than building it into the price. On a median single-family home, somewhere near $415,000 at 2025 prices, the listing-side commission by itself runs about $10,000 to $12,500. Skip it and that is what you keep. That is the headline, and it is true.

The Real Costs of Selling Without an Agent

The honest version has footnotes the cheerleaders tend to drop. You will probably still be asked to cover a buyer's agent, because plenty of buyers still arrive with one. You will pay a flat-fee service a few hundred dollars to get your listing onto the MLS, the database that feeds Zillow and the rest. And you will spend the evenings and weekends doing the work the agent would have done: the photos, the calls, the showings, the back-and-forth on the offer. Homes sold by owner have also tended to go for a little less, partly because the sellers most likely to try it are the ones with the simplest sales to begin with. The savings are real. They are also smaller, and more conditional, than “keep the whole commission” makes them sound.

How Other Countries Handle Private Home Sales

Here is the part the American debate almost never touches. In much of the world, selling a home without an agent is not a clever way to beat the system. It is simply how a large share of people sell, and always has been. Once you see how they do it, the US model stops looking like the default and starts looking like one option among several.

Germany: The Notary Comes First

Start with Germany, because it breaks the American mental model cleanly. There is no MLS. A private seller lists on a portal such as ImmoScout24, fields the enquiries, and runs the viewings. What they cannot do is skip the notary. Under the German civil code a property sale that is not notarized is void, full stop. The notary is not on anyone's side: a neutral officer of the law who drafts the contract, reads it aloud to both parties in person, and registers the change of ownership. The estate agent, the Makler, is the part that is optional. Since a 2020 reform the commission on homes is split between buyer and seller, so a German who sells privately does not shave off a commission slice. The charge never arises, and by local custom the buyer pays the notary anyway.

The Netherlands: DIY Selling with Portal Access

The Netherlands is stranger, and more instructive. Selling without a makelaar is ordinary there, but with a twist that has no American parallel. Funda, the portal where essentially every Dutch buyer looks, accepts listings only from registered agents. So the do-it-yourself seller pays a flat-fee “internet makelaar” a few hundred euros purely to get the listing placed, then handles the viewings and the negotiating alone. The legal transfer, as in Germany, runs through a mandatory civil-law notary, the notaris. The Dutch route is documented down to the fees, and it makes a point worth holding onto: one word, agent, can hide completely different jobs depending on which country you are standing in.

Britain: Lower Commissions, Different Responsibilities

Britain splits the difference again. No law there requires an estate agent. But Rightmove and Zoopla, where British buyers actually search, accept listings only from member agents, so a private seller pays a flat-fee portal service to appear on them. The legal side goes to a conveyancer or solicitor, never the agent. And the average British commission is about 1.42 percent including VAT, a small fraction of the American figure, which says something quiet but important about what a US seller is really buying with that five or six percent.

What the International Comparison Really Shows

Line these up and the real lesson has nothing to do with agents being a ripoff. The word agent simply covers a different set of jobs in every country, and in a lot of places the law has already pulled those jobs apart for you. In Germany the notary handles the part that genuinely protects both sides, while the Makler only sells reach and convenience. The Dutch makelaar's real lever turns out to be portal access, not irreplaceable expertise. The American agent, meanwhile, bundles in a buyer-side network that, since the 2024 settlement, a seller is no longer expected to subsidize by default. Seen as separate parts, the choice stops being “agent or no agent” and turns into “which of these specific tasks do I want to pay someone else to handle.”

Why the Answer Depends on Where You Live

That reframing happens to be the only honest way to estimate what you would save, because the answer is local to the point of being almost personal. The commission norm, who pays the notary or the solicitor, whether you can even reach the dominant portal on your own, the tax on your gain: every one of those changes at the border, and some of them change between regions inside the same country. Importing assumptions from American real estate television is how people end up surprised at the closing table.

So before deciding anything, read how it actually works where you live. A reference that lays out the rules country by country is far more use here than any rule of thumb, because the first thing you need to know, who pays the notary or the solicitor in your market, is exactly what a generic guide leaves out. Then run your real figures through a calculator that shows what the commission costs on a sale your size. An average percentage tells you about other people's homes. Your own numbers tell you about yours.

The Bottom Line

None of this makes selling without an agent the right move for everyone. If your local market is thin, if your time is short, if negotiating turns your stomach, then paying for help is a perfectly rational choice, and a good agent earns every bit of the fee. Agents are not the enemy here. The mistake is treating a financial decision as a matter of loyalty or rebellion, when it really comes down to the numbers and the rules where you happen to live. Most of the world has understood that for years. After 2024, Americans finally get to as well.