Hey. How’s it going everybody? It’s Hugh Boy with HBI Home Solution. In this video, I’m going to talk to you guys about the closing costs that are associate with the sale when you sell your house in Augusta Georgia. Without further adieu, let’s dive right in.
I will often say that closing costs is one of the most overlooked aspect when you sell your house. People can think that they don’t have to pay any closing costs at all, and let’s say if they buy the house for $100,000, and they sell their house for 200, then they just pocket the $100,000 difference, but that’s not the case at all. Not with closing costs involved because closing costs can be quite pricey.
With that in mind, the first closing cost that I need to talk to you guys about is the real estate commission. At least for the Augusta area, the typical commission for a real estate agent is going 6% of the sale price. Let’s say that if you sell your house for $200,000, that’s going to be a $12,000 in terms of commission and you have to pay to the agent, right? 6% of 200 is 12. That’s straightforward, and quite honestly, that’s a lot of money to be paid. Right? Because 12 grand is almost a W2 salary for a few months, so I’m not sure about you, but when I hear that number, it’s always boggled my mind, right?
Why does the real estate agent cost so much? The reason has to do with they are the one who prepared the listing. They have to market the properties. They have to show properties to different buys, and then negotiate and prepare all the documents. One, the more important thing is they hold the hands of the buyer and seller and make sure they don’t get cold feet. Make sure that they follow through with the plan, and not getting too jumpy and quit in the middle of the transaction, because, quite frankly, right? Real estate transaction is big dollars, right? It’s probably going to be one of the most expensive thing that you’re going to buy or sell during your entire life. It makes sense that people always have second thoughts somewhere in the process, and real estate agents just be there to make sure they’re calm. Make sure they follow through with the plan. So on and so forth. That’s why agents can cost an arm and a leg in today market.
That 6% commission is split up between the buyer agent and the seller agent. The buyer agent’s take 3%, and the seller agent take 2%, and combined it cost 6% because you need both buyer agent and seller agent to be able to sell a house on market. Now, on the other hand, if you sell it directly to us, we’re HBI Home Solutions, so we buy houses assets and we’re direct buyers so we don’t need any real estate agent to walk us through the process. We have done this for dozen and dozen of times already, so we know the process. We know the attorneys. We have everything in place to be able to get things done, and because of that, we don’t use the real estate agent. It doesn’t cost you 6%. It saves us money, save you money. That’s something to keep in mind as well.
Now, the second closing cost that I want to cover in this video is going to be escrow fees. This includes the title search. Your settlement fees. The title insurance, some local fees, and tax transfer. Last but not least, at least in Augusta, you have to pay an attorney the fee to be able to close on the house because we are not a title agency state. We’re a closing attorney state, so every sales of a house requires a closing attorney to do the work. That’s that.
All of the fees combined typically will fall into the range of I’ll say 2% of the sales price. Let’s say again, if you sell a median home in Augusta, which $200,000, right? That’s going to cost you four grand in escrow fees. But you don’t have to pay for that, right? If you sell it the traditional way to a regular buyers, of course you’ve got to pay for some of it, but when you sell it to us, we will cover this cost. We have a really good relationships with our attorneys. They know our process. It typically be more efficient and also cheaper for us to handle that fee because we just have the volume that the attorneys usually give us a really good discount, to begin with, and we know the process. We’re not going to be a giant pain in the rear for them to work with. All in all we save money by doing things our way, and ultimately we pass on that saving to you. Instead of wondering how much the closing cost is and wondering how much you’re going to have to pay in the end, most people don’t find out about closing costs until the closing date.
Instead of worrying about all of that, all I’m saying is we will pay for it, so this way, it doesn’t cost you any more money and you know exactly how much you’re going to make from the sale in day one. That’s also important.
The third thing, and you need to pay attention to is going to be repair costs, because when you sell to a regular buyers, they might nitpick a lot of things that you have to fix on your house. Especially after the inspection report. They’re going to come back with a laundry list of things that you have to fix. Some things as simple as a paint chip on the wall. A couple of holes. Maybe it should be a [inaudible 00:06:24] to be serviced. Maybe a roof need to be redone. All of that can cost thousand of dollars, right? And you just never know what the buyer’s going to ask. That can be also costly, but if you sell it to HBI Home Solutions, we do not ask you to do any repairs whatsoever. The reason is we specialize in buying properties that need some work. That’s our core value. That’s what we do. That’s what we enjoy doing.
We have a full time construction crew that can handle pretty much any repairs that you throw at us. In this way again, it’s going to be more efficient for us to fix things than for you to do it. It might cost you four grand to paint your entire house, but if we paint it, because of the volume we give our contractor, it might only cost you two grand to paint the whole house. It’s almost make more sense for you to not fix up a house and sell it as-is to us. Not only do you save money and you also save the time and hassle of going through the entire process and dealing with different contractors, right? Instead of worrying about all that, just sell your house as-is to us, and do not worry about any repairs whatsoever.
Let’s see, the final thing for a closing cost is going to be staging and marketing, right? Even though you pay your agent %6 commission, that does not include staging and marketing. Some agent will ask you to buy some, not buy but to rent some furniture to make the place look more homey for the end buyer, and they might hire professional photographers to go in and take a dozen of pictures with your house. With the correct lightings and also getting all the drawings up there, taking a really broad top view of the entire place. It’s fancy stuff, but it’s not cheap. Right?
The whole thing can cost about $1,000 to $2,000, depending on the size of your house. They want to impress the home buyer by putting all the bell and whistle on your place. Just putting all of shiny object on your house, but that’s cost money, and when you sell it to us, we don’t care about any of that. Right? We want to remodel the house anyway, so we don’t care if it have furniture in there or not. We don’t live in the house at all, so we don’t need to feel homey. When we walk into the house, all we care about is does the house have potential or not? And can we make it better by doing our own work?
In the sense, when you sell it to us, you don’t have to pay for any staging at all, and you don’t have to pay any marketing fees because we’re the end buyer. You don’t need to market anywhere else if you sell it to us already. If that makes sense.
I mean, that’s really it. That’s really the four main closing cost that you really need to pay attention to. I mean, that’s it. But if you do want to learn more about our company and what we do here as HBI Home Solution, like I said, we buy houses as-is. Pay all the closing costs, and you can sell your house really fast in Augusta Georgia. There’s no hidden fees. There’s no costs involved with the process. The price that you get from the sale will be net to you, minus any mortgage you might have. It’s really transparent pricing and you know exactly how much you’re going to make from the very start, comparing it to selling it to the regular home buyers. You do not know, you really do not know how much you’re going to make until the closing date happens.
If that sounds like you, if that sounds like something you are interested in, feel free to submit a form in our website about selling your house, and we’ll be sure to reach out to you as soon as possible. Our response time is typically within a few minutes to top, one or two hours. Reach out to us. We’ll respond right away, and with that, I’ll see you guys in the next video. Goodbye.