Yes, you can. There’s no law in Western Australia that says you must use a real estate agent to sell your home. You’re free to do it yourself.

But “can I?” is the wrong question. After more than two decades selling homes across the Perth Hills, the honest question is “should I?” — and to answer that, you have to understand what the job of selling a home actually is. Because it isn’t putting a sign out the front and waiting for the phone to ring.

Let me walk you through what I’ve seen, with real numbers from real sales, so you can decide with your eyes open.

Is it legal to sell your house without an agent in WA?

Yes. It’s completely legal, and no law requires you to use an agent. But very few people actually do it — research suggests only around 1% of homes sold in Australia are sold without an agent. It’s rare for a reason, and the reason isn’t that people don’t know it’s allowed.

In my experience it’s mostly sellers in the middle-ring and outer-ring suburbs who try it, and the motive is simple: they want to save the commission. You almost never see it at the top end of the market. Those owners already understand the value of a good agent, and they’re usually busy people running a business or working a senior role who have no interest in having ten or twenty strangers wander through their home hoping one of them turns out to be a buyer.

That’s the part most people underestimate. A few weeks in, the typical private seller has had twenty groups through, every one of them saying “lovely home, we’ll get back to you” — and then never calling again. Buyers almost never tell you the truth. They won’t say it’s overpriced, or that they didn’t like the kitchen or the layout. They stay polite and they vanish. That’s real estate. It’s the single hardest thing in this job to get used to, and it’s a big reason so many agents don’t last past their first year.

Will you actually save the commission by selling privately?

Usually not — and often you’ll lose far more than you save. Every time I’ve sat down with someone who sold privately and gone through their numbers, I can see where it went wrong. They think they saved 2.5% in commission. In reality they often gave away 5–10% in the negotiation. They just don’t realise it.

Here’s why. Negotiation is a skill, and if you don’t do it for a living it’s very hard. The classic private-sale negotiation is a tennis match: you drop half, the buyer comes up half, and a few volleys later you’ve settled well below where you should have. The for-sale-by-owner
websites make it all sound easy and tell you they’ve got people to help — but they’re generally not experienced agents. Often there’s just one in the whole organisation who is,
and a fair few of those businesses were started by someone who didn’t make it as an agent.

And you don’t even save on the marketing. Every private-selling platform I’m aware of charges for marketing, paid upfront, exactly as you would with an agent.

People rarely admit any of this afterwards. It’s like buying a car — I’ve never once met someone who said they didn’t like the car they bought. We justify the decisions we’ve made. The seller who left $60,000 on the table will tell you the sale went beautifully, because the alternative is admitting it didn’t.

A real example: a $635,000 private offer that should have been $810,000

This is the one that shows it best. I had a seller in Kelmscott with a subdividable block — a five-unit site once you knocked the house down, or a retain-and-build with three units at the rear. He’d been trying to sell it himself and had a contract sitting in front of him ready to sign.

His daughter rang me. She’d told him not to sign yet and to get me to look at it first. So I went round.

The private offer was $635,000 — low to begin with. But the real danger was buried in how it was structured. The buyer was putting down a $1,000 deposit and taking control of the property for the next 18 months while he pushed a subdivision approval through.

Here’s the mechanism, and almost no seller understands it because it’s perfectly legal. With a tiny deposit and a long settlement, that buyer effectively ties your property up for a year and a half at almost no risk. If the approval comes through, he on-sells it and does what’s called a simultaneous settlement — he settles with you and with his own buyer on the same day, and walks off with the profit, having put in almost nothing but the approval costs. If the market turns or the numbers stop working, he simply walks away. His total loss is $1,000.

Meanwhile you’ve sat there for 18 months believing your home was sold, missing every other buyer that came and went.

We took the property on and advertised it properly. Within 18 days we had an offer of $810,000. The owner had been working off an appraisal a different agent had done three years earlier. He knew the market had risen — he just had no idea how far. That’s $175,000 more than his private contract, on a deal that wouldn’t have tied him up for 18 months.

What can go wrong with the contract and settlement?

A lot — and the contract is where a private seller is most exposed, because it’s the part you
can’t see going wrong until it’s too late. Every sale in WA runs on the Offer and Acceptance together with the Joint Form of General Conditions for the Sale of Land, the standard contract published jointly by REIWA and the Law Society of Western Australia. The system is deliberately simple and clear. But the danger lives in the special conditions, and that’s where experience earns its keep.

Every special condition has to spell out four things: what needs to be done, who has to do it, by when, and what happens for both sides if it isn’t done. Get the wording wrong and you can find yourself paying to fix something, or watching money come off your price at settlement. There are real disclosure obligations too — asbestos, whether your RCDs and smoke alarms are compliant, any caveats on the title, easements and what type they are, covenants controlling what can and can’t be built, and whether everything on the property has actually been approved by the council.

There’s also the paperwork that has to travel with the contract: a copy of the certificate of title, and the Landgate Property Interest Report — an increasingly important document that flags things like bushfire-prone-area status, easements, infrastructure, pool compliance and more. Two compliance points catch people out constantly, and the law is specific: at least two RCDs must be fitted before the title can transfer, and smoke alarms must be mainspowered, less than 10 years old and in working order before transfer, with fines up to $5,000 for getting it wrong.

Let me give you a live example of why the wording matters. Right now I’m selling a home with two older hot water systems. They’re 25 years old, but they work. The buyer has it in his head that he’s buying a brand-new home and wants brand-new units installed. Because the contract was written properly, he hasn’t been able to push that through his settlement agent — and that single piece of correct wording has saved my seller $9,730. It’s the same reason we deliberately exclude things like garden reticulation in our contracts. Come the final inspection, I could turn the reticulation on and one sprinkler head wouldn’t fire — a $3 part — and that alone could hold up an entire settlement. We take it off the table in writing from the start, so everyone knows exactly where they stand before anyone gets stressed.

How much work is there really, once it’s “sold”?

A lot — and most people have no idea how much. If a home sells quickly, the assumption is
that the agent got lucky and did nothing. It’s the opposite. In my experience, around 60% of tthe real work in a sale starts after the contract is signed.

Years ago we mapped our entire process onto the wall of our training room — every step from a buyer’s first contact right through to settlement and beyond.

It runs across about a dozen stages and well over a hundred individual steps: first contact,
the appraisal, preparing the listing, running the live marketing campaign, qualifying and following up every single buyer enquiry, the property going under offer, settlement, and the follow-up afterwards — plus separate tracks for when a price needs changing, when a sale falls over, and when a property is withdrawn.

A huge amount of that work sits after a buyer’s offer is accepted — chasing finance week by week, checking the contract conditions, managing the deposit, handling building and pest inspections, and steering the whole thing through to settlement without it collapsing. That’s the part nobody sees from the outside, and it’s the part that protects your price after the handshake. It’s also the exact part a private seller takes on entirely alone.

Aren’t buyers and sellers protected anyway?

This is the part hardly anyone thinks about, and it’s one of the strongest reasons to be careful. When you buy from a private seller, there’s very little consumer protection. If something goes wrong during or after the sale, it’s largely buyer beware. If a private seller isn’t truthful about the property, the buyer often has no real comeback — it becomes one person’s word against the other’s.

A licensed agent is a completely different proposition. In WA we operate under a statutory Code of Conduct, the paperwork is governed jointly by the regulator, the Law Society and REIWA, and complaints can be taken to Consumer Protection. The guidelines are clear and the penalties for breaching them are heavy. That accountability is part of what you’re paying for, and it protects both sides of the deal.

Here’s a dangerous one I see: a buyer offers to rent the home for, say, six months while they “sort out their finance,” then settle. It sounds reasonable. But the people who push this hardest sometimes want the house for something other than living in — including illegal activity — and they’ll bait you with above-market rent and an offer $50,000 or $100,000 over your asking price. Come settlement, the deal evaporates, and the house can be left damaged. In those circumstances your insurance generally won’t cover you at all.

Can’t I just use a settlement agent instead of an agent?

No — they do different jobs, and this trips a lot of people up. A settlement agent is not experienced in how real estate contracts should be written, and they’re not in a position to advise you on how the conditions should be structured. Their job is to follow and execute the contract once it exists. There are clear boundaries between the two roles.

So if you sell privately, you are the one writing those special conditions — the exact thing that, written wrong, costs you money at settlement, as my hot water example shows. The settlement agent picks it up afterwards. Everything before that point — pricing the home, marketing it, qualifying buyers, structuring and writing the contract — is on you.

What about the marketing — can’t I just list it myself?

Not directly on the big portals. realestate.com.au and Domain only allow licensed agents to
list, so a private seller has to go through one of the for-sale-by-owner companies (which are themselves licensed agencies) to appear there at all.

When someone tells me upfront they’re going to sell privately, my advice is always the same: do not skimp on marketing. It’s the most important thing you can do, and don’t leave anything out. It’s like insurance — you don’t know which rock your buyer is going to come out from under. Some buyers only ever look at one website; leave that one out and you can miss a genuinely good buyer.

Where private sellers fall down is the quality. The photography is usually the giveaway, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a private seller produce a proper video walkthrough. Then there are the brochures and how the home is actually presented. All of it feeds how the home feels when a buyer walks through the door, and how it’s marketed is the difference between one person turning up and twenty turning up.

Which brings me to the line that sits under everything: you don’t get your best price in isolation — you get it with competition between buyers who want your home. Creating that competition is exactly what you should be paying a real estate agent to do.

What happens if your private sale doesn’t work?

This is the part the platforms don’t put on the brochure: if your home doesn’t sell, the “saving” you went in for can quietly disappear, and you can end up paying commission anyway.

One way it happens is you give up after burning your best weeks on the market and start again with an agent — by which point buyers can see the home has been sitting, which weakens your hand before you’ve even relaunched. The other way is sharper. Some of the private-selling sites, if your home hasn’t sold, will on-sell your lead to a real estate agent and I’ve seen arrangements where they then take up to 30% of that agent’s commission when the property finally sells.

So you set out to avoid paying commission, and you can end up paying it anyway — with an extra middleman clipping the ticket on the way through.

Is there ever a good time to sell privately?

Yes — and I’ll be honest about it, because pretending an agent is always the answer would
be dishonest. If a family member wants to buy your home, I have no problem with that at all. Call me, I’ll come round, give you an honest value so it’s fair for everyone, step you through the paperwork and point you to a good settlement agent. The same goes for a divorce settlement, or transferring a property or a half-share between family members. In those cases there’s no marketing and no negotiation to handle, so doing it yourselves makes complete sense.

This game is a long game. It’s not about what an agent can extract from you today — it’s about helping, and that builds relationships that last for decades. All I ask in return is that people are upfront. Don’t get me out to do a full appraisal and then find out a week later it was only to shop me for a number. Be straight with me and I’ll be straight with you. That’s how I like to operate.

So, should you sell your house without an agent?

For the reasons above, unless it’s a family member or an internal transfer like a divorce or a change of ownership between relatives, I wouldn’t. I genuinely can’t think of another
situation where it’s a good idea. Yes, sometimes a private sale goes through smoothly —that does happen — but there are too many variables for it to be the simple process the websites make it out to be.

The biggest one is emotion. Yours, as the seller, swinging up and down through the whole process. And the buyer’s, once they’re in a position to buy, doing exactly the same. That emotional tug-of-war on both sides is what quietly kills private sales — and it’s the reason I never sell my own homes myself. I’m too attached, too sure of where I think the price should be. I bring in another agent specifically because I need someone removed from the emotion to tell me what I need to hear.

So here’s the one thing I’d want you to walk away understanding. Stop thinking of it as “selling a home.” You’re not selling a home — the sale is just the outcome. The actual job, the thing you or your agent should be doing properly, is marketing the property, negotiating the sale, and getting it safely through to settlement. That’s the difference, and that’s where homes are won or lost.

If you’re weighing it up — whether to sell privately, or just whether an agent is worth it — get an honest appraisal before you decide anything. Call the office or get in touch with me directly. No pressure, no game-playing, just a straight conversation about what your home is really worth and what it would take to get you there.

Truth. Strategy. Sold.

This article is general information based on more than two decades of selling property in the Perth Hills. It isn’t legal advice. For your own situation — especially anything involving contracts, disclosure, trusts, or complex ownership — speak to a licensed settlement agent or a property lawyer.