How Zillow Buys Homes in Atlanta
Per Zillow, when Zillow buys your home, it is a service that they provide to you. You get to control your own timeline as to when you will move on to your new home. They provide you with a dedicated Atlanta Zillow advisor, not a licensed real estate agent, who will navigate you through the process from application to closing. Because of these reasons, Zillow also charges a service fee on top of the selling costs and other costs associated with selling your home to Zillow.
You begin by starting an application on Zillow’s website to answer some questions about your Atlanta home. Next your advisor will call you to confirm the information provided on your application.
The pricing team then calculates how much Zillow would be able to offer you based on the information provided on the application and the sales in your metro Atlanta neighborhood.
Zillow will not provide you with an offer without first seeing your home. They provide a free in-home evaluation to determine what repairs are needed and to determine any preparations needed prior to closing. From here, they will analyze the condition of your home and provide you with a formal offer.
The offer that you receive from Zillow will include the fees that you will have to pay in order for you to sell your home to them. These fees will include the costs of home improvements, closing costs and Zillow’s service fee. Zillow states that their service fee is “similar to agent commissions in a traditional sale.” They will give you three days to accept or decline their offer.
If you accept their offer, you can choose to close within 7-90 days after going under contract. This makes it convenient for you because if you have a new home that you are buying, it gives you the time to close on it and make your moving arrangements.
You may be asking yourself, will Zillow buy my home? If that’s the case, you are right to wonder. Zillow prefers to buy homes here in Atlanta that aren’t too old. A minimum of 2 bedrooms for townhomes and 3 bedrooms for single family homes. They prefer two-story homes. They also prefer homes that have a resale value in the high $100’s to the high $400’s. Zillow will not buy mobile homes and limits their purchases of condos at this time.
Your Zillow offer and your Zestimate may be totally different numbers. The offer that you receive from Zillow may be lower than your Zestimate. Zillow states that additional factors are considered when coming up with a final number for your offer, therefore the Zestimate on their website, based on AVM, will vary.
Just because you won’t have any showings of your home to sell to Zillow doesn’t mean that they won’t evaluate your home with a fine tooth comb in person. In fact, when they send an evaluator out to inspect your home, it can take up to 2 hours to complete.
They will use the information provided in this two-hour long evaluation to determine any costs that it will take them in order to put your house back on the market in a move-in ready condition. If you don’t disclose or have any unknown repairs, then this may cost you big time.
And you won’t be avoiding that pesky agent commission…
When selling to Zillow in Atlanta, you will still have to pay an agent’s commission. Part of the fee that Zillow charges sellers in order for Zillow to buy your house from you covers the agents commissions not only when they purchase the house from you but when they put it back onto the market.
Here is a breakdown of the fees involved when selling your Atlanta home to Zillow
Zillow charges a service fee that can range from 1.5% all the way to 9% but they state that the average service fee that Zillow charges is 2.5% of the sales price. Zillow charges this fee to cover any carrying costs that they may encounter while owning your home along with mitigating any unknown risk when re-selling your home.
Zillow will charge you selling costs, similar to agent commissions, as high as an additional 6%. You will also be expected to pay 1-2% in closing costs with an additional 1-2% deducted for the costs of repairs.
All in all, Zillow does a good job of listing out all of the costs associated with selling your house in a detailed report. In total, you could anticipate paying between 9-19% in fees to sell your house to Zillow.
If you agreed to sell your home to Zillow for $200k, this would mean that you would net between $162k and $181k whereas the net to list your home with a traditional realtor at a 6% commission would be $188,000. Click here to learn more about how Woodland Realty can get your home on the market for less money today. Zillow...why such a huge range in fees? From what we could observe, it all boils down to how much they will determine their service fees to be and the cost of the repairs that your home will need in order for Zillow to get your Atlanta home back on the market. At the end of the day, no matter how you spin it, you will be paying for the repairs that your home needs whether it is up front before you close or at the closing table where your net profit will be reduced. The question will be will you get your cousin Vinnie to paint the walls for you or will pay Zillow to get their third party contractors to do the job? So, is selling my Atlanta home to Zillow worth it? In the end, you must be the judge of that. Zillow mentions on their website that selling your house to Zillow works best in these situations:
- You’re relocating for work and need to move quickly.
- You’re getting a divorce and you need to quickly divide your assets
- You’ve inherited a property that you’re unsure of what to do with and you don’t want to carry monthly expenses.
- You are unloading a rental property.
- You’re selling your home remotely and don’t have the bandwidth to control the sale
- You don’t want to deal with the hassle of listing: Zillow states that this process is stressful for home sellers but since we are in a seller’s market, home owners are having an easier time selling their homes, outlining and getting exactly what they want in order to move forward and sell their properties.
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