How to Buy a House Without a Realtor

Buying a house used to mean one thing. You found an agent, they showed you homes, they wrote your offer, and somewhere along the way you handed over about 3 percent of the purchase price. For a $400,000 home, that's $12,000. For a $700,000 home, it's $21,000. And most buyers never really knew what that money was paying for.

That old playbook is cracking. Buyers are asking harder questions. A growing number want to buy a home without realtor help entirely, or at least without paying full 3 percent commission, and walk away with tens of thousands of dollars they would've otherwise given up. You hear it in search terms like "buy house without agent" that are climbing year over year.

So how do you actually do it? Can I buy a house without a real estate agent, and if I can, should I? That's the question every smart buyer is wrestling with right now.

The short answer is yes, you can skip the traditional 3 percent realtor, but you shouldn't skip having a buyer's agent entirely. Here's why: the seller's agent is almost always getting paid a commission either way, and if you show up without representation, the listing agent simply keeps both sides of it. That's money you could have kept in your pocket. The smarter move is to use a modern buyer's agent, like Homa, that charges a fraction of the traditional fee and rebates the seller-paid commission back to you. You need a plan to do this right. This is that plan.

Why people are skipping realtors in the first place

The NAR lawsuit changed everything. In 2024, a federal court approved a settlement against the National Association of Realtors that forced the industry to rethink how commissions work. Before the settlement, sellers almost always paid both their own agent and the buyer's agent, usually 2.5 to 3 percent each. Buyers thought the service was free. It wasn't. That commission was baked into the price of every home.

Now buyers have to sign a written agreement with any agent who shows them a home. They have to agree on what that agent gets paid, in writing, before they ever step inside a property. It made the whole system transparent in a way it never was before. And once buyers saw the actual number attached to the service, a lot of them started asking whether the service was worth it.

For some people, it is. A full-service agent holds your hand through the whole process, and if this is your first home or you're buying somewhere unfamiliar, that hand-holding is real value. But for a growing share of buyers, especially ones who've done this before or are comfortable doing their own research, the answer is no. They'd rather keep that $15,000 for a kitchen renovation or a mortgage rate buydown.

What a realtor actually does (and what you can do yourself)

Here's the honest breakdown. A buyer's agent does a handful of things on your behalf:

• Finds homes that fit what you're looking for

• Schedules and attends showings

• Writes your offer

• Negotiates with the seller's agent

• Coordinates inspections

• Walks you through closing documents

• Answers questions along the way

Every single one of those can be done without a traditional agent. You can search for homes on Zillow, Redfin, or Realtor.com. You can schedule showings directly with listing agents (they'll usually say yes because they get paid either way). You can write your own offer using templates your state bar publishes for free. You can hire an inspector, a title company, and a real estate attorney if you want legal eyes on the contract.

What you can't easily do yourself is get MLS access. And you can't represent yourself in the traditional sense if the listing agent is working with a buyer's agent on the seller's side. That's where a modern buyer's agent like Homa changes the math.