Lowering costs of selling (Title co. fee's, realtor commission)

I’ve purchased and sold my first two homes this year and one thing that is killing me are the fee’s associated with selling a property. I’m not trying to get rich off of 1 transaction but it seems all the little things chew up a lot of the profit.

I’ve considered taking real estate courses and get licensed so that I can have access to MLS and list my own properties. I have an agency that would allow me to work for them and the local dues add up to about 1k between association and MLS fee’s per year. I would save that from 1 transaction by not paying full 6% to a real estate agent.

I haven’t figured out a way to save on title fee’s… title insurance, closing fee’s, search fee’s etc… anything I can do here?

Once you get a bit more experience in real estate investing you won’t need to deal with a lot of realtors when buying houses. When selling them you should consider using a flat fee listing, which will cost you around $400 just to get your properties listed on MLS, plus abut 1/2 of a percent of your sales price. If the buyer has an agent you can negotiate their fee.

As for the other costs, they are pretty much set in stone as the providers really dont make that much money on a transaction basis. You may be able to lower the costs a little thru volume, but not much. The best way overall to keep you cost managable i to buy the houses as cheap as possible (about 30-40 cents on the dollar). Invest in a good investing course like Ron Legrands for a couple hundred bucks and you’ll do fine.