Why private selling grows when money's tight

There’s a pattern hiding in fifteen years of New Zealand sales data. When the market runs hot, private selling shrinks. When it flattens, private selling grows. In the frenzied market of 2021, just 3.1 per cent of home sales were private; by 2024, with prices flat, the share had more than doubled to 7.6 per cent, close to the decade’s high of 8 per cent set in 2016 (Cotality data, reported by RNZ in July 2025). Selling a house privately to save money moves from fringe idea to mainstream maths at exactly the moment the money gets tight.

Selling your house privately in NZ saves the commission with certainty: roughly $26,450 on the July 2026 national median of $760,000 at published big-agency rates, before the $2,000 to $5,000 marketing campaign most agencies charge on top. Whether an agent would win you a higher price is unproven. The saving is not.

The pattern: when margins thin, the commission line gets read

Cotality’s head of research offered the explanation himself: private selling rises when sellers are cost-conscious (RNZ, 15 July 2025). The cycle makes sense from a kitchen-table view. In a boom, a five-figure commission hides inside a six-figure capital gain, and nobody reads the line items on a winning trade. In a flat year the same commission stands in the open, often bigger than the year’s entire price growth, and sellers start asking what it buys. MoneyHub’s private-selling guide reaches the same conclusion from the consumer side (checked July 2026): on average NZ house prices, the estimated commission savings hold up for the average home.

The 2016 high of 8 per cent and the 2024 near-repeat of 7.6 per cent both arrived in cost-conscious markets; the 3.1 per cent low arrived in the euphoric one. Sellers scrutinise costs precisely when costs decide the outcome. There are no villains in that story. An agent is a service with a price, and prices get compared when budgets tighten.

Does selling your house privately save money in NZ? The flat-market maths

The arithmetic behind the pattern is short. The REINZ national median was $760,000 in July 2026, down 0.7 per cent over the year — the median home gave back about $5,000 of value in twelve months. Commission on that median home at Barfoot & Thompson’s published rates (3.95% on the first $400,000, then 2%, plus GST) is roughly $26,450, and most agencies charge a marketing campaign of $2,000 to $5,000 on top (2026 cost-of-selling guide). Call the agent route $28,500 to $31,500.

Set those numbers side by side and the cost of an agented sale is now larger than the median home’s entire annual price movement — in a year when that movement was backwards. You can’t turn the market around, and you can’t move interest rates. The selling cost is the one big number in the whole transaction a seller gets to choose, and it dwarfs every other line on the invoice: conveyancing runs $1,500 to $2,500 and photography a few hundred dollars (2026 guides). Nothing else is even the same order of magnitude.

Auckland sharpens the picture. The city’s median was $940,000 in July 2026, down 3.6 per cent over the year (REINZ, July 2026), and the same rate card still produces commission of about $30,600 before marketing. The percentages sound small until they’re multiplied by a house.

The fair argument for agents, and what the studies found

Agents make a serious counter-argument: skill matters most in a soft market, when buyers are scarce and pricing mistakes get punished. The RNZ piece carries the working versions of it, including a salesperson’s point that a private seller naming too high a price can kill a deal, and the observation that private sellers who overprice at launch spend the rest of the campaign walking it back. Take the pricing warning to heart; it’s the best point on the agent side of the ledger, and acting on it costs nothing (set your number from the settled sales around you).

But the core claim, that professional selling wins a higher price when times are hard, has been tested, and it struggles. The two best like-for-like studies anyone has run, at Stanford and in Madison, Wisconsin, both found agent-sold homes went faster but at no higher price, and in the Stanford study the agented sellers netted less once commission came out. Speed, yes. Price, no. And in New Zealand’s flat 2024, even the speed advantage failed to show: private listings sold in a median 71 days against 75 for agent listings (Cotality/RNZ, July 2025). Both studies are American and single-market, and we’ve laid out those caveats, along with the NZ price data and its confounds, in our companion piece on whether private sellers get less.

What the cost-conscious seller does with all this

The honest summary hasn’t changed: the saving is certain, the price premium is unproven, and preparation is what closes the gap that does exist (over ten years, 76 per cent of agent listings sold against 65.1 per cent of private ones — with the failures clustering around pricing and presentation, both fixable).

Preparation is also purchasable. That’s the slot Celby fills: professional photography, the Trade Me listing, a conveyancing lawyer, and a step-by-step process, for a flat $8,000 including GST. On the current median, that’s roughly $18,500 kept before you count the agency marketing budget you didn’t spend.

Booms forgive expensive habits; flat markets audit them. In 2024, roughly one New Zealand seller in thirteen did the sums and kept the difference.

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? (15 July 2025)
2. REINZ July 2026 market data (national median $760,000, −0.7% YoY)
3. Barfoot & Thompson commission rates
4. Leanne Stewart — Cost of selling a house in New Zealand 2026 (agency marketing $2,000–$5,000)
5. Lawyer Finder — property lawyer costs NZ (conveyancing $1,500–$2,500)
6. MoneyHub — How to sell your house privately (checked July 2026)
7. Bernheim & Meer — Do Real Estate Brokers Add Value When Listing Services Are Unbundled? (NBER w13796)
8. Hendel, Nevo & Ortalo-Magné — MLS versus FSBOMadison.com (NBER w13360)