Do private sellers really get less for their homes?

Ask an agent whether you should sell privately and you’ll usually get the same answer: you’ll save the commission, sure, but you’ll get a lower price, so you’ll end up worse off. It’s the industry’s favourite warning, and it decides more sales than any other single claim.

So it’s worth asking the rude question directly: do private house sales actually sell for less?

We sell a flat-fee private selling service, so we have obvious skin in this game. That’s exactly why we’re going to show you the actual numbers, including the ones that don’t flatter us. You can weigh them yourself.

Do private house sales sell for less? The NZ data

There’s only one NZ dataset that compares agent sales with private sales, and it comes from Cotality (the property analytics firm formerly known as CoreLogic), reported by RNZ in July 2025.

On the raw medians, agent sales came out ahead. In 2025, agent-sold properties had a median price of $740,000 against $662,500 for private sales. In 2024 the gap was much narrower: $735,000 versus $704,000.

Case closed? Not quite. Cotality’s own head of research, Nick Goodall, attached a caveat that most people quoting this data leave out: the gap “could reflect a different mix of properties being sold”. Cheaper properties are more likely to be sold privately in the first place, so the comparison sets different houses, in different suburbs, at different price points, side by side and calls it a fair fight. Goodall went as far as saying the data isn’t definitive enough to show whether agents deliver enough extra value to cover their commission.

And look at 2024 again. The gap that year was $31,000. Commission on a $735,000 sale at Barfoot & Thompson’s published rates (3.95% on the first $400,000, then 2%, plus GST) comes to roughly $26,000, before you add the $2,000 to $5,000 marketing campaign most agencies charge on top. In other words, in the most recent full year of data, the raw price gap and the cost of the agent were about the same size. Even taking the medians at face value, the average 2024 seller ended up close to square. They just paid a five-figure fee for the privilege.

What the research says when you compare like with like

The property-mix problem is why economists don’t use raw medians for this question. Two well-known studies got around it by comparing similar homes, sold by similar people, in the same market: some with agents, some without.

The first is from Stanford. Economists B. Douglas Bernheim and Jonathan Meer studied sales of Stanford university housing, where faculty and staff could sell through an agent or through a free university listing service. Same campus, same buyer pool, comparable homes. Agents did not achieve higher selling prices. What they did do was sell homes faster. After commission, sellers who used agents walked away with less.

The second looked at Madison, Wisconsin, where a popular for-sale-by-owner website competed directly with the agents’ MLS system. Economists Hendel, Nevo and Ortalo-Magné compared thousands of sales across both platforms and found the same pattern: agent-listed homes sold faster and were more likely to sell, but not at higher prices. The private sellers kept the commission.

Both studies are American, both are single markets, and the sellers in them were probably more organised than average. Those are fair criticisms and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. But they remain the best like-for-like evidence anyone has, and neither found the price premium that agents claim as fact. No New Zealand study has ever compared like with like. Until one does, “you’ll get less privately” is an assumption wearing a suit.

The part of the criticism that’s fair

Private selling has one real weakness in the NZ data: completion. Over the past decade, 76 per cent of agent-listed properties sold, against 65.1 per cent of private listings. Some of that gap will be the same property-mix problem. But some of it is real, and the causes aren’t mysterious: overpriced listings that sit until they go stale, dim phone photos, listings buyers never see, sellers who don’t follow up enquiries.

Notice what those causes have in common. None of them is “there was no agent in the room”. Every one of them is preparation — and preparation can be bought, learned, or both, for a lot less than $26,000. That’s the entire reason Celby exists: professional photography, proper marketing, a lawyer on the agreement, and a process that tells you what to do next, for a flat $8,000 including GST.

There’s a detail in the Cotality data that supports this reading. In 2024, private sales actually sold faster: a median of 71 days on the market against 75 for agent sales. Buyers were plainly willing to deal with private sellers. Buyers want the house. The agent was never the thing they were shopping for.

Where that leaves you

Strip it back and the decision looks like this.

The saving is certain. On the current national median of $760,000 (REINZ, July 2026), commission at published big-agency rates is around $26,450 including GST, plus the marketing budget. That money is gone whatever your house fetches.

The premium is unproven. The only NZ comparison is confounded by property mix and roughly cancelled out by fees in its most recent year, and the best like-for-like studies found no price advantage at all — just a speed advantage that, in 2024 New Zealand, private sellers matched anyway.

The risk is real but specific: unprepared private sellers under-perform. The fix isn’t hiring an agent. It’s doing what good agents do: price from settled comparable sales rather than hope, present the home properly, and get the paperwork ready before buyers ask. Then you keep the $20,000-odd difference for yourself.

We’d rather you made this call with the caveats attached than with anyone’s sales pitch, including ours. Read the RNZ piece. Read the Stanford abstract. Then look at what three months of sold prices in your own suburb are telling you. The evidence won’t make the decision for you, but it does something better: it takes the fear out of it.

Celby is not a licensed real estate agent. You’re selling your property privately, and all decisions about your sale are your own.

Sources

1. RNZ / Cotality — Is it worth paying a real estate agent to sell your house? (July 2025)
2. Bernheim & Meer, “Do Real Estate Brokers Add Value When Listing Services Are Unbundled?” (NBER w13796)
3. Hendel, Nevo & Ortalo-Magné — MLS versus FSBOMadison.com (NBER w13360, published in the American Economic Review)
4. Barfoot & Thompson commission rates
5. REINZ July 2026 market data