How Much Will It Cost To Sell Your Home
This is a subject that comes up during all our listing consultations, we often find that there are a few surprises. The question most folks want to know is: “How much money am I going to have when it’s all said and done?” While we will not be able to answer that in this week’s #ProTipTuesday, we will be able to give you a pretty good idea of what costs you should consider when selling in the Jacksonville, FL area.
Costs:
- Paying off the mortgage.
This is generally the largest amount that is taken out of your proceeds, unless you own your home outright. You can get this amount by calling your lender and asking what the pay-off amount is. To put all of this in perspective, let’s use $400K as the sales price and $100K as the remaining mortgage pay-off amount.
- County Taxes
Because county taxes are paid at the end of the year, or “paid in arrears”, you will have to credit the buyer for the portion of the year that you owned the home. The earlier in the year you close, the less you pay in taxes. To get a rough idea, you can divide last year’s annual property tax by 12 and multiply that by how many months you will have owned the home at the time of closing. It won’t be exact, but a pretty good idea for what to expect.
- Title Fees
For the sake of brevity, I will include all the miscellaneous closing costs in this category. They include: Document Stamps, HOA Estoppel Fees if applicable (they also vary widely between different HOAs), Title Insurance, Title Attorney/Company, Courier Fees, Survey (if you don’t have a copy already), Document Storage and Escrow Facilitation. There may be others depending where the house is and who does the title work. Title Attorneys commonly charge around $400.00 Courier and Wire fees can be expected to stay around $100. We estimate the fees to total about 1.5% of sales price. This is an over simplification and should only be used as an approximation. The lower the price of the house, the higher the costs as a percentage and the opposite for a more expensive house. 1.5% of $400K is $6,000.
- Agent’s commissions
To keep with the theme, this cost also varies. For the sake of calculation, expect around 6% of sales price as this is the amount most commonly seen. 6% of $400K is $24,000.
Example sales price: $400,000
Total cost of selling the home: $30,000
Example Mortgage Pay-off amount: $100,000
Approximate Net Proceeds (not including taxes) for this example: $270,000
Other potential costs you should anticipate are repair costs that the buyer may request. Some repairs are asked for but not necessary, others like wood destroying organism repairs and plumbing or electrical must almost always be done for the loan to be approved. There are some big ticket items too that may come up like a new roof or A/C system, the age and condition of your home play a big role in how many repairs will be requested or required. If you would like us to do an approximate Net Sheet for you and your home, let us know. We would love to sit down and talk you through the numbers.
