Costs of Selling A House

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Selling any type of freehold or leasehold property can be an exciting process but also an expensive one. There are costs that you might incur before, during and after selling and it’s crucial to learn about these in order to plan a budget for the sale of your home. This guide explains these costs of selling and also offers some tips on how to potentially lower them.

1. What is the typical cost for selling a house or flat?
2. Potential costs before finding a buyer for your home
3. Conveyancing expenses associated with selling a property
4. Mortgage fees, taxes and other costs after selling a flat or house
5. Costs linked to various methods for selling your home
6. Top queries and answers about the costs of selling a house

What is the typical cost for selling a house or flat?

Selling a property can be an expensive process, potentially costing many thousands of pounds, but the exact amount will depend on a wide range of factors unique to your situation, as Unbiased says.
As you’ll see in the following sections of this guide, these specific costs can include charges you would have to pay before selling such as repairing flaws with your property, the fees involves with the conveyancing process of collecting important information about the home and any property you want to buy next, and mortgage fees and other costs you’ll face after the sale.
If you’ve found your next dream home but are concerned about having to spend a lot of money on the various expenses involved with selling your current property and buying another, don’t worry – this guide also provides details on options for selling that might be able to significantly reduce your costs.

Potential costs before finding a buyer for your home

Even before you find a buyer for your house or flat, you may have to pay certain charges linked to work that needs to be done to the property and various other tasks. Below you will see some of the most common situations of an upfront expense at the start of the selling process.
Energy Performance Certificate: Your home should have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating from A to G, with A being the most efficient and G the least. But if your property does not currently have an EPC then you will have to get one before selling, and the cost for doing this can range between £55 and £120, according to The Advisory.
Making repairs to your home: One possible upfront expense is if you decide to fix any type of structural problem at your property. This can range from relatively small and inexpensive steps like addressing missing roof tiles or broken windows through to lengthy work like correcting subsidence which can cost many thousands of pounds. Whether you can afford, or want to, pursue this work before selling the property will depend on your budget and goals.
Paying to advertise your listing: The four typical methods for selling a home and their costs are outlined in a later section of this guide, but an initial expense that you might have to account for is paying to advertise your property when you decide to sell on your own. It can cost several hundred pounds at least to successfully promote your listing, which will describe your property and features photographs of the interior and exterior, to generate interest from buyers.

Conveyancing expenses associated with selling a property

One crucial step in the property selling process is the legal process of conveyancing, and in general terms this is when a solicitor or other legal expert handles the paperwork required for the sale of your home.
The actual work that conveyancers do is much more detailed and wide-ranging and it includes preparing the contracts for exchange to complete the sale of your house or flat, overseeing the transfer of cash from the buyer to the seller, liaising with the UK Land Registry to check on title deeds and other information, and a number of other time-consuming and necessary tasks.
Conveyancers charge fees for doing this work, and this is another expense that you’ll have to account for when planning to sell your property. The average fee is about £2,000 but this can be higher or lower depending on the professional that you use, the scope of the work and more.
The process for leasehold homes can a few hundred pounds more expensive than you’ll pay with freehold properties because there may be more documents involved, as Which? explains, so plan accordingly when selling this type of home.

Mortgage fees, taxes and other costs after selling a flat or house

As well as the costs associated with EPCs and other fixes to your property before selling, along with conveyancing costs, there are some expenses you might incur after a successful sale.
Not all of these home selling costs will apply to your situation, but it’s important to learn about them all because it can help you to more accurately plan a budget for the eventual sale of your flat or house.

Mortgage fees

If you have a mortgage on your existing property, it’s possible that you can port, or transfer, this loan over to the next dream home that you want to buy. But if you do not have a mortgage at your existing property and need to get one for your next residence, this can include fees.
Some mortgage lenders offer no-fee loans, which means your only cost will be the monthly repayments that you will be required to make on the mortgage. Other companies will impose upfront fees and these can start at £1,000 but potentially be even higher.
Note also that if you are unable to port your current mortgage over to your new home, you will likely have to close out that loan as part of the selling process, and there can be fees associated with this because it will technically be an early payoff of the loan. Lenders tend to charge fees for such a move because they’ll lose out on future interest and repayments from the loan.

Capital Gains Tax

When it comes to tax, the good news with selling your property is that you can avoid the potentially costly Capital Gains Tax if the home is your sole private residence.
This exemption is known as Private Residence Relief and there are certain other conditions that must be met, as the UK government’s website explains. These include that you only have one home and it has been your residence the entire time you lived there, you have not let out any part of it, you have not used any part for a business, the total grounds are less than 5,000 square meters and you didn’t buy it to make a gain.
If one or more of these factors do not apply – for example, the property you’re selling is a retirement home that you inherited but do not want to keep – then you will have to pay Capital Gains Tax on the sale of your house or flat, and this amount will vary. But if the tax applies then you should plan on spending several thousand pounds at least for this charge.

Costs linked to various methods for selling your home

You might also incur some additional costs depending on which method you choose for selling your home, whereas a few of the methods can help you avoid fees entirely.
Typically, you can select among selling to a quick home buyer like LDN Properties, selling with an estate agent, selling at an auction or selling without any help. All of these methods have their own pros and cons, ranging from the benefit of not paying commission when you sell to an honest no-fee quick buyer through to the drawback of selling on your own taking a long time.
One way to narrow down your options is to review the details of the four methods below and them compare them against your top aims with selling, such as how long you are prepared to wait before getting a buyer, whether you are open to paying fees and your ideal sale price. This should help you with identifying which of the four options is the most suitable choice.

Selling to a quick home buyer

The first way to sell your home is doing so with a quick buyer, and this can be a fast and zero-cost option. LDN Properties, which launched in 2003, is a quick buyer which means it has the funds available to immediately purchase your home, with no waiting for weeks or months to initially get approved for a mortgage that would cover the cost of the transaction.
This cuts the typical timeline when selling this way down to just a handful of weeks and that includes the time taken to exchange contracts and pay you the full proceeds. So, if it’s the speediest possible sale that you are looking for, this is usually your ideal option, particularly when compared to choices that might take more than a full year, like using an estate agent.
Quick buyers are also well known for being able to make fair and fast offers to buy almost any type of freehold or leasehold property, regardless of their age, condition, location, shape, size or type. Some of the many purchases and offers that LDN Properties has made include dilapidated houses, off-plan properties, nursing homes, flats with a leak, timber frame houses, properties located near to an industrial estate, homes without a structural warranty, flats with damp problems, mews houses, properties with a restrictive covenant, homes with high levels of radon, flats that do not have a Leasehold Property Enquiries form, prefabricated houses and many other scenarios.
And you will never have to pay any commission when selling to a legitimate zero-fee quick buyer, which helps with avoiding another expense and reducing your total selling costs. That compares very favourably to selling through an auctioneer or an estate agent, which are two approaches that will charge you commission. This fee will be subtracted immediately from the eventual sale proceeds, which will be another expense to add to your total selling costs.

Selling with an estate agent

The second way to sell a home is with an estate agent, who will do most of the work needed to find a buyer. This starts with creating a listing then advertising this in their office, online and in local newspapers, then organising viewings to give potentially dozens of people a tour of your home in person. Finally, they will hear offers and ideally taken one to exchange of contracts.
Although this means you will not have to put much work into finding a buyer for your home, the downside is that an estate agent will charge you commission if they succeed in selling the property. And this will add to your selling costs because the fee will be taken out of the sale proceeds, usually in a range of 1.15 percent to 1.40 percent of the final home sale price.
Selling with an estate agent is also often a slow process and it can take many months, or sometimes even more than an entire year, to find a buyer. Therefore, if you need to sell on a much swifter timeline then you should review other options, like selling to a quick buyer.
Remember also that a buyer can make a genuine offer to purchase your home but then change their mind and withdraw it, causing the sale to collapse – and they can do this without facing any penalties so long as the contracts have not yet been exchanged. If this happens it will create more delays for selling your house or flat because you’ll have to start over with seeking a buyer.
Another caution when it comes to selling with an estate agent is that some of them may give you a very promising quote for your property’s sale price despite knowing secretly that the home will only attract buyers at a much lower value. Their reason for doing this is to get you to sell using their services so that they can profit from the fees they’ll charge you if the home sells.
To avoid falling for this trick you should first ask many estate agents to give you a free no-obligation quote for your home’s potential sale price, and second look on Rightmove, Zoopla and other property sales websites for the current and past sale prices of properties like yours. Finally, calculate the average of all these prices and this should give you a much more accurate rough estimate of the value of your house or flat and its possible sale price.

Selling at an auction

The third way to sell a home is through an auction, and this is also a method that will not need much effort on your part. That’s because the auctioneer will be responsible for producing and advertising a listing to get buyers interested in your home, along with hosting the auction and overseeing the final legal paperwork and other steps following a successful sale.
But this is another selling choice that will add to your overall costs because auctioneers charge an owner commission if they are able to sell their home. Usually, this fee is set at about 2.5 percent of the property’s final sale price, but it might be higher or lower than this amount.
It is possible that certain auctioneers could be open to having the buyer pay a share of your auction expenses, or to reduce the commission that they will charge you, so it can be a good idea to ask whether this might be possible. Just beware that other auctioneers could charge even more than 2.5 percent commission, which would further increase this expense.
When you sell at an auction you will have to choose a reserve price, which is the lowest value at which you agree your home can sell. Ensure that you calculate a reserve price that should produce a profit from the sale after you have deducted the auctioneer’s fee, otherwise you create the risk of either selling breakeven, which means close to the amount that you originally paid for the property, or even worse you may end up selling your flat or house at a loss.
Another negative aspect of selling at an auction is that you will have a lot of waiting, including many weeks or longer between when you choose to use this method and when the auction happens. If your property doesn’t get any bids at the auction then it will remain unsold and you’ll have to start over with looking for a buyer, delaying your selling timeline even further.
If the home does sell then the buyer will have about a month to sign all of the mandatory legal documents and handle their other steps to complete the process of buying your home, delaying the sale further. You could inquire with specific auctioneers about whether they are open to reducing this timeline but some companies could give the buyer even more than a month.

Selling without any help

The fourth way to sell your property is doing so on your own, and this can easily be the most time-consuming and stressful way of attempting to find a buyer for the home.
The reason behind this is that you will need to take care of every task needed to sell your property, starting with creating and advertising a listing, organising viewings for people to get a trou of the interior and exterior of your home, hearing offers from potential buyers and ideally taking one of those offers through to the final stage of exchanging contracts.
Do not be surprised if it takes more than a full year to sell your home using this method, unless you already have experience with selling properties or you have a suitably qualified family member or friend that is open to helping you with the selling process at no charge.
Selling without any assistance does have the advantage of completely avoiding having to pay any commission to an estate agent or an auctioneer. But you will face other expenses that you do not need to pay with other methods of selling, for example paying for advertising for your listing – and these expenses can easily eliminate any saving of not having to pay commission.
If you are committed to not paying fees when selling your property but think selling on your own would be too stressful, you may want to consider selling to a quick buyer like LDN Properties.
These companies promise to never charge you commission when selling your house or flat, which helps with reducing your overall home selling costs. And you would get an additional perk of completing the sale of the property on a much faster timeline because quick buyers can finalise the purchase of your home within a few short weeks – and this includes the important last steps of exchanging contracts and paying you the entire sale proceeds.

Top queries and answers about the costs of selling a house

LDN Properties has been buying homes across the UK since 2003 and often gets queries about the costs of selling a house or flat – here you can see our answers to those questions.