Selling your house privately in Australia: the actual saving, the actual workload, and when it doesn't work

Selling your house privately can save $20,000 to $40,000 on a typical $900,000 Australian sale, but the saving is the easy number. The hard numbers are the 40 to 60 hours of marketing, vetting, and negotiation the agent would have absorbed, plus the discount a self-listed property often takes on final price relative to the same property professionally marketed. Net of both, the saving is real but smaller than the gross fee figure suggests.

Private sale is legal in every state and territory. The contract, the vendor disclosure documents, and the cooling-off rules are identical whether an agent runs the campaign or the owner does. What changes is who does the work, who answers the buyer's call at 7pm on a Tuesday, and who holds their nerve when an offer comes in $30,000 under expectations on day three.

What the agent actually does

Before deciding whether to do it yourself, it is worth being honest about what the commission buys. A full-service agent typically covers the following.

• Property preparation advice: a styling brief, recommendations on minor repairs, a photography plan, and (in some campaigns) a stylist or stager.
• Marketing collateral: photography, floor plan, drone shots where relevant, copywriting, a print brochure, and the listing build itself.
• Portal placement: listing on realestate.com.au and Domain. These portals are agent accounts by default; private sellers reach them through For-Sale-By-Owner platforms that resell the listing access.
• Signboard and local marketing: a sign on the lawn, letterbox drops in a target radius, and database emails to the agent's buyer list.
• Buyer enquiries: phone, email, and portal-message handling, including the inspection calendar and reminder follow-ups.
• Open inspections: a 30-minute Saturday open plus a midweek twilight is the usual cadence in most metros. The agent hosts them.
• Buyer qualification: filtering genuine buyers from tyre-kickers and from buyers who cannot finance the price they are quoting.
• Price negotiation: managing offers, running multiple parties against each other, and counter-offering on the vendor's behalf.
• Auction conduct: if the campaign goes to auction, the agent (or an auctioneer they engage) runs the day.
• Settlement coordination: contract signing, conveyancer liaison, deposit handling, and the calendar between exchange and settlement.

A private seller does not have to replicate every line of that. Some pieces (drone shots, premium brochures) move the dial less than the listing photos and the price. But the scope is the scope, and walking into a private sale without a clear plan for each item is where most owner-led campaigns slip.

The DIY checklist

Run in roughly this order, ideally over four to six weeks before the property goes live.

• Get a registered valuation ($500 to $1,000) or three independent agent appraisals. The number anchors realistic price expectations and protects against the common owner mistake of pricing to ambition rather than to comparables. See property valuation methods explained for what each approach actually measures.
• Engage a conveyancer or solicitor immediately. They prepare the contract of sale and the vendor disclosure statement (section 32 in Victoria, Form 1 in South Australia, equivalent elsewhere) before the property goes to market. Around $1,500 to $2,500. The companion piece on the vendor disclosure statement covers the documents you must hand a buyer before any contract is signed.
• Photographer and floor plan ($500 to $1,500). The single most important spend in the campaign. Online buyers screen on the first three photos, and a phone snapshot loses against the professional shot every time.
• Copywriter or do-it-yourself listing description (free to $400). Length matters less than getting the suburb keywords, school catchment, transport, and floor plan logic in the first paragraph.
• For-Sale-By-Owner platform ($600 to $1,500 for realestate.com.au and Domain access, depending on listing duration and tier). The tier choice matters: a Feature listing meaningfully outranks a base one in search results.
• Sign on the lawn ($150 to $300 from a local sign printer). Cheap and effective. Roughly 10% to 20% of enquiries on a residential listing come from passers-by.
• Inspection logistics: schedule opens via the portal calendar, host them yourself, keep an attendance sheet (name, phone, email, finance status).
• Buyer qualification: ask, politely, about pre-approval, deposit source, and timing. A buyer who cannot answer those is not a serious one yet.
• Negotiation: respond to written offers, counter, manage parallel parties, and document everything in writing.
• Acceptance and signing: the conveyancer handles the document flow, deposit, and the path to settlement.

When private sale works

• Hot market with strong buyer demand. If the property sells itself, agent value-add is marginal. Many private sales in 2021 cleared at or above comparable agent-marketed sales for exactly this reason.
• No tight time window. If the seller can absorb a 6 to 8 week timeline without pressure, the private path has room to breathe.
• Seller comfortable with negotiation. The ability to hear an offer $40,000 under expectation and respond commercially, rather than emotionally, is half the job.
• Common property type with strong comparables. A standard 3-bed townhouse in an established suburb has dozens of recent sale prices to calibrate against. Pricing risk is lower.
• Property already presentable. Below the threshold where styling and staging would materially lift the price.

When it doesn't work

• Slow market. When buyers are scarce, the agent's database and active outbound work is the actual value-add. A FSBO listing in a 90-day market can sit, and the discount on final price grows the longer it sits.
• Premium or unique property. Architect- designed, acreage, heritage, or top-of-market properties need bespoke marketing and a buyer pool the owner does not have direct access to.
• First-time seller under stress or timing pressure. Divorce, deceased estate, distressed sale: the emotional load is already high, and the campaign work compounds it.
• Property with defects requiring careful disclosure: water-damage history, easements, retrofit issues, encroachments. The legal risk on a mishandled disclosure is high enough that professional support is worth its cost.

The saving math

The gross fee figure that gets quoted is the commission plus the marketing pack. Both are real, and the agent path has both.

• Standard agent commission: 1.8% to 2.5% plus GST, varying by state and inclusions. On a $900,000 sale that is roughly $16,200 to $22,500 plus GST, or $17,820 to $24,750 all-in. The companion piece on selling agent commissions breaks the state ranges down.
• Marketing pack: $3,000 to $8,000 for signs, professional photos, premium listing tier, and brochures. Most agencies charge this separately from commission.
• Total agent path: roughly $20,000 to $30,000 on a typical $900,000 sale.
• Private sale total cost: conveyancer $2,000 + listing platform $1,000 + photos $1,000 + signs $300 + valuation $700 + miscellaneous $1,000 = about $6,000.
• Gross saving: $14,000 to $24,000.
• Final-price haircut risk: research on private sales suggests a 1% to 3% discount on the achieved price versus the same property professionally marketed in equivalent markets, or roughly $9,000 to $27,000 on a $900,000 sale.
• Net saving range: roughly negative $13,000 (where the haircut wins) to positive $15,000 (where the saving wins).

The selling cost calculator will run the numbers against your own sale price and state, including transfer of any capital gains exposure. If the property is not your main residence, the CGT calculator is the next stop, and the rules on the main residence exemption sit at main residence CGT exemption rules.

A worked example

Vendor sells a $900,000 Melbourne 3-bed townhouse.

• Agent path: 2.0% plus GST commission = $19,800. Marketing $5,000. Total fees: $24,800. Final price achieved (assume): $895,000. Net to vendor: $870,200.
• Private path: total cost $6,000. Final price achieved at a 2% haircut: roughly $881,500. Net to vendor: $875,500.
• Cash difference: private path is $5,300 ahead of agent path on cash.

Then the opportunity-cost adjustment. Assume the vendor invested 50 hours of their own time across six weeks on inspections, enquiries, and negotiation. If their market value of time is $100 an hour, the opportunity cost is $5,000, and the actual cash saving net of time falls to about $300. If their market value of time is $150 an hour, the opportunity cost climbs to $7,500, and the private sale is roughly $2,200 worse than the agent path once time is priced in.

The right answer depends on what your time is worth and how confident you are in achieving close to the agent-marketed price. A vendor who is retired, comfortable on the phone, and selling a property in a hot market has a very different equation from a dual-income family selling a unique property in a slow one. The math is the math; the inputs are personal.

Choosing between private treaty and auction

Private sale and private treaty are not the same thing. Private treaty is a sale method; private sale (FSBO) is about who runs the campaign. You can run a private-treaty FSBO, or you can run an auction without an agent (rare, but possible with a hired auctioneer). The trade-offs between the two sale methods are covered in auction versus private treaty, and the answer interacts with the FSBO decision: most owner-led campaigns work better as private treaty, because auctions place a heavy premium on the auctioneer's buyer-management skills on the day.

The legal pieces no seller can skip

Three pieces are non-negotiable regardless of who runs the campaign.

• Vendor disclosure documents. The section 32 statement in Victoria, Form 1 in South Australia, and the equivalents elsewhere must be ready and accurate before the contract is signed. A mishandled disclosure is the most common reason a sale collapses or attracts legal action after settlement.
• Cooling-off rules. Most states give residential buyers a cooling-off window (typically 2 to 5 business days) on private-treaty sales. Auction sales generally have no cooling-off period. The companion piece on cooling-off periods by state covers the exact windows and what voids them.
• Conveyancer or solicitor. Whether you engage a licensed conveyancer or a solicitor depends on complexity; the comparison at conveyancer versus solicitor walks through which sales benefit from full legal advice rather than the standard conveyancing service.

Settlement itself is a day of adjustments rather than a single transaction. The arithmetic of who pays for what between exchange and the keys handing over is at settlement day adjustments.

What to do with the answer

Run the saving math against your own sale price and state, honestly. Add the time cost at your own market rate, not at zero. Discount the expected achieved price by 1% to 2% as a base case, and stress-test what happens at 3%. If the net number is still positive and you have the temperament for inspections and negotiation, a private sale is a defensible choice. If the net number is close to zero or negative, the agent path is buying certainty and a buyer pool the FSBO route cannot replicate at a price that is, on the math, fair.

The headline saving is rarely the saving. The honest saving is the gross fee minus the marketing the seller still pays, minus the price haircut, minus the value of the seller's own time. A surprisingly large share of the time, that number is positive but modest. The decision is whether the modest number, plus the non-financial benefits of running your own campaign, is worth the work.