Real Estate Attorney for selling directly to a buyer we found
Looking for real estate attorney to facilitate the sale of our home directly to a buyer. We found a buyer who would like to purchase our home without the typical process of putting it on the market etc. They are willing to purchase as is.
This is appealing to us since it would save us from the costs of agent fees, fixing up home so its market ready, etc. Estimated total cost to use agent including market prep is about $150k. Would the costs of an attorney be about the same, more, or less?
Any experiences with selling a home directly to a buyer or attorney recommendation would be appreciated.
Jul 6, 2022
Parent Replies
We bought our house through a private sale in October 2017. We used Brett Weinstein at Realty Advocates. You don't actually need a lawyer -- they charged us a flat fee that we split with the sellers (if I remember correctly, it was $2800 each -- 5 years ago). It was super easy and painless.
Best of luck and as someone being on the buying side, I admire you for doing a private sale -- it made it possible for us to buy a house in Berkeley!
Sorry, this is the site for Brett's business facilitating private sales: https://fsbomyhouse.com/
In my experience, it would be substantially less. We went through a very similar process about 1.5 years ago to get our home.
We sold our bay area house in 2019 to a friend and used a lawyer, and it cost WAY LESS than going with a realtor. We used Greg Glaser https://www.gregglaser.com/attorney/. Looks like he's charging $5,000 flat rate right now (we paid less in 2019)... He did 3-way call with the seller (us) and the buyer (our friend) to make sure we're all on the same page, we understand the process, and answered all of our questions. This was pre-covid, and Greg was already 100% remote, we never met him but the whole thing went very smoothly.
We used Victoria Smith in Orinda and she was great! The whole thing cost us less than $5,000.
We're currently using Jean Shrem to represent us in our conventional (with agent) home purchase. Jean is absolutely great. She is knowledgeable, friendly, and communicative. While we did not use her for a direct sale, her website indicates that that's actually her specialty. I highly recommend you check her out.
Plus one for Brett Weinstein at fsbomyhouse.com! He was very easy to work with and has it all lined up to be very streamlined. Around $5k.
Here's another recommendation for Jean Shrem. We used her for a direct, complicated sale of a Southern California income property, to the next-door neighbor.
It all went wonderfully. I am a licensed broker myself, and have a tendency to go down rabbit holes. Jean did not go down rabbit holes with me if she deemed them unnecessary, saving us a lot of money in the process in her billable hours. Prior to the sale, we had to make some tricky title-transfer decisions, and she steered us in the right direction each time.