This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide legal, financial, or tax advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.

A home selling strategy is the set of decisions you make before the sign goes in the yard: who represents you, how the home gets marketed, and how you’ll answer the offers that come in. The representation decision carries the biggest price tag. A listing-side commission commonly runs 2.5% – 3% of the sale price, and since the 2024 National Association of REALTORS® settlement changes took effect on August 17, 2024, those fees are explicitly negotiable and can no longer be advertised through the MLS. Selling on your own or through a discount brokerage cuts that cost but moves the pricing, marketing, and negotiating work onto you.

Learn more about home selling strategies, including how to choose representation, how to market a home that has something unusual about it, and how to handle multiple offers.

Key takeaways:

• Representation is the biggest line item you control: Listing-side commission commonly runs 2.5% – 3% of the sale price and is fully negotiable on a $350,000 Michigan sale that’s roughly $8,750 – $10,500.
• Marketing is mostly photography and the first week: The overwhelming majority of buyers start online, and a listing gets its heaviest traffic in its first 7 – 10 days, which is why pricing and photos have to be right on day one, not day thirty.
• The highest offer isn’t always the best offer: Financing type, contingencies, and closing date can be worth more than a few thousand dollars in price, and if the buyer’s loan falls apart, the price on the contract was never real.

Who should sell your home: an agent, a discount broker, or you?

Most sellers still hire a full-service listing agent, and the trade is straightforward: you pay 2.5% – 3% of the sale price to hand off pricing, marketing, showings, and negotiation, or you keep that money and do the work yourself. Here’s how the three paths compare before you commit to one.

Approach	Typical listing-side cost	Who prices and markets	Who negotiates	Best for
Full-service listing agent	2.5% – 3% of sale price, negotiable	Your agent, using MLS comps and professional photography	Your agent, as your fiduciary	Most sellers, especially first-timers and anything above the entry price band
Discount or flat-fee brokerage	A reduced percentage or a flat listing fee	Split, you often handle showings, staging, and feedback	Varies by package; sometimes you	Sellers who are comfortable running their own showings and reading their own market data
For sale by owner (FSBO)	No listing commission	You	You, across the table from a licensed agent	Sellers who already have a buyer, or who know their micro-market cold

The honest math on FSBO is worth seeing before you decide. In NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, FSBO accounted for about 5% of sales, with a median FSBO price of $360,000 against $425,000 for agent-assisted sales. That gap isn’t a clean apples-to-apples comparison, FSBO homes skew toward rural properties and lower-cost housing, but it does tell you the savings aren’t automatic. FSBO works best when the buyer already exists.

If you go the traditional route, the hiring decision matters more than the brand on the sign. Ask for the agent’s last 12 months of listings in your ZIP code and your price band, not their office-wide numbers, and ask what percentage of their listings sold versus expired. Our guide to how to choose a real estate agent lays out the criteria that actually predict performance, and the questions to ask when you interview an agent give you a script for the conversation. If the pitch that lands is a lower fee, read the pros and cons of a discount real estate agent first. The savings are real, and so is the list of tasks that comes back to you.

How much does it cost to sell, and what are you signing?

Plan on 6% – 10% of the sale price in total selling costs, and closer to 8% – 10% once you’re compensating both sides of the transaction and agreeing to a buyer concession. On a $350,000 Michigan sale, that’s roughly $21,000 – $35,000 covering commission, transfer tax, title work, prorated property taxes, and any credits you give the buyer. Our complete guide to selling a home breaks every one of those lines down; this section is about the two decisions that set them.

The first is what you pay and to whom. Since the settlement practice changes, seller-side and buyer-side compensation are separate written conversations, you decide whether to offer buyer-agent compensation at all, and how much. Understanding how much an agent makes from a home sale after the brokerage split makes that negotiation less awkward, because you can see what’s actually on the table.

The second is the listing agreement itself. Read four terms before you sign:

• Type of agreement: An exclusive right to sell pays your broker no matter who finds the buyer. An exclusive agency agreement lets you sell it yourself commission-free, which sounds better than it usually works out.
• Term length: Three to six months is common. Shorter terms keep leverage with you; if the agent needs a year, ask why.
• Protection period: After the listing expires, the broker is still owed a commission if a buyer they introduced closes within a set window, typically 30 – 180 days. Get the window and the named-buyer list in writing.
• Exit clause: Ask how you cancel if performance disappoints. A broker who won’t put a cancellation path in writing is telling you something.

Your seller’s agent agreement also defines who owes you a fiduciary duty. That gets complicated when the same agent or brokerage represents your buyer, read what to know about dual agency before you agree to it, because a dual agent cannot advocate for your price against the buyer’s. Declining dual agency is a normal, reasonable thing to do. Finally, whatever you clear at closing may or may not be taxable depending on how long you lived in the home and how much you gained, talk with a tax professional about your specific situation before you spend it.

How do you market a home so the right buyers see it?

Photography and the listing description do most of the work, because nearly every buyer sees your home on a screen before they see it in person, and decides there whether it’s worth a Saturday. Everything else in a marketing plan is downstream of those two assets.

• Photography and video: Professional photos are the single highest-return marketing dollar you’ll spend, usually $200 – $500 for a typical home. Shoot after staging, in daylight, with a wide-angle lens and lights on. Twilight exteriors and a short walkthrough video are worth it above the entry price band.
• Virtual tours and floor plans: A 3D tour and a dimensioned floor plan filter out buyers who’d walk out in the first room and pull in relocating buyers who can’t tour in person. Which matters in a state that gets a lot of out-of-market buyers.
• The listing description: Lead with what’s genuinely uncommon, the lot, the school district, the mechanical updates with dates. Skip the adjectives and give the buyer facts they can’t get from the photos.
• Open houses: Be honest about what they do. Open houses generate agent relationships and neighbor traffic far more often than they generate the buyer who closes. Run one in the first weekend if it’s easy; don’t build your strategy on it.
• Feature-specific marketing: A pool, solar panels, acreage, or a luxury price band each need a different buyer pool and a different pitch, including documentation most buyers will ask for, lease or loan paperwork on solar, maintenance history on a pool.

Start with how to market your home online for the portal-and-syndication mechanics, and if your home has something unusual about it, marketing a home with unique features covers how to turn a niche feature into a shorter days-on-market instead of a longer one. Marketing only works on top of a correct list price, our pricing and preparing hub covers valuation, prep, and staging.

When should you list, and what if your home doesn’t sell?

The best listing window in most Michigan markets runs from late March through June, but timing matters far less than price: a correctly priced home sells in a slow month, and an overpriced home sits in a hot one. Here’s the rule of thumb that saves sellers the most money. If you’ve had steady showings and no offer after about two weeks, or no showings at all after 10 days, the problem is price, not patience.

Market conditions change the playbook, not the principle:

• Seller’s market: Price at or slightly under recent comps to manufacture competition, set an offer deadline, and expect to negotiate terms rather than price.
• Buyer’s market: Price ahead of the market rather than behind it, budget for a concession, and make the home the easiest one in its band to tour and inspect.
• Declining market: Your first offer is often your best offer. Chasing the market down with small price cuts costs more than one decisive cut early.
• Need to move fast: Price, access, and condition are the three levers. Widening showing hours is free and works.

How much the calendar actually costs you is measurable, see how market timing affects home sales, and if your window is tight, our strategies for selling a home quickly rank the moves by speed per dollar.

If the listing stalls, triage in this order: price (no offers after two weeks of showings), photos (traffic online but no showings), access (restricted showing windows kill more deals than sellers realize), condition (showings and consistent negative feedback), and finally agent (no plan, no communication, no changes after 30 days). Fix the specific signal the data is giving you rather than reflexively cutting the price. If your sale has a complication behind it, a divorce, an inherited property, a lien, a relocation deadline, the selling situations hub has a dedicated playbook for each.

How do you evaluate and negotiate offers?

Evaluate every offer on four axes, price, financing strength, contingencies, and timing, because an offer that doesn’t close is worth zero regardless of the number on the front page. A $355,000 offer with a shaky preapproval and a home-sale contingency is usually worth less than a $348,000 offer from a fully underwritten buyer who can close in 30 days.

This is where a mortgage broker’s read is genuinely useful, so here’s ours: not all preapproval letters mean the same thing. An automated preapproval means a computer read a credit report and some stated income. A fully underwritten preapproval means a human underwriter has already reviewed the buyer’s tax returns, pay stubs, and assets, and the file needs only a property and an appraisal. Ask your agent to ask the buyer’s loan officer one question: has this file been through underwriting, or is it an automated approval? The answer is free, and it tells you which offer is real.

• Countering a lowball: Counter, don’t ignore. A written counter with two or three recent comps attached converts more lowballs than sellers expect, and costs you nothing but a day.
• Running a multiple-offer round: Set a deadline, notify every agent who has shown the home, and ask for highest and best with proof of funds or a preapproval attached. Compare the top three side by side on all four axes, our guide to how to handle multiple offers shows the comparison grid.
• Seller concessions: A credit toward the buyer’s closing costs often buys more goodwill per dollar than an equivalent price cut, and it keeps your recorded sale price, and your neighbors’ comps, intact. Loan programs cap what you can give: on a conventional loan for a primary residence, interested-party contributions max out at 3% of the lower of price or appraised value above 90% LTV, 6% between 75.01% and 90%, and 9% at 75% or less. FHA caps interested-party contributions at 6% of the sales price, with anything above treated as an inducement to purchase that reduces the buyer’s loan. VA caps seller concessions at 4% of the home’s reasonable value, though certain closing-cost credits are counted separately. Work through how to negotiate seller concessions before you agree to a number.
• Buydown versus price cut: Spend a $10,500 concession on discount points or a temporary rate buydown and it usually moves the buyer’s monthly payment several times more than cutting the price by the same $10,500 would. Because a price cut only removes about $10,000 of loan, worth roughly $60 – $70 a month at recent rate levels you can benchmark against the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey.¹ Same cost to you, bigger effect on the buyer’s approval.
• Contingent, cash, and as-is offers: A home-sale contingency ties your closing to a stranger’s closing. Cash removes appraisal and financing risk and can close in 7 – 14 days instead of 30 – 45, which is worth real money if you’re carrying two housing payments, but the discount cash buyers ask for is often larger than the risk they’re removing.
• Seller financing and leasebacks: Both are tools, not last resorts. A post-closing leaseback lets you stay 30 – 60 days after funding and solves the move-out gap without a double move.

Once you accept, the clock and the contingency deadlines take over, our selling process hub walks the escrow-to-closing stretch day by day.

What Michigan sellers should know

Four Michigan rules hit the seller’s side of the settlement statement, and none of them are optional.

• Transfer tax: Michigan charges $8.60 per $1,000 of sale price, $7.50 state ($3.75 per $500 under the State Real Estate Transfer Tax Act) plus $1.10 county ($0.55 per $500 in counties under 2 million people), and by custom the seller pays it. On a $350,000 sale, that’s $3,010. A narrow state-level exemption exists for certain principal-residence sales; ask your title company whether yours qualifies.
• Seller’s Disclosure Statement: Michigan’s Seller Disclosure Act requires a written disclosure statement on transfers of one to four residential dwelling units, delivered before you execute a binding purchase agreement. Failing to deliver it gives the buyer a right to terminate. Selling “as-is” does not erase your duty to disclose known material defects.
• Principal Residence Exemption: After the home stops being your principal residence, you have 90 days to file a Request to Rescind Principal Residence Exemption with your local assessor. Getting it wrong follows you onto a tax bill, the Michigan principal residence exemption page has the form and the rules.
• Winter listings: November through February brings fewer buyers, but also far fewer competing listings and buyers who are usually on a deadline. The reflexive “wait until spring” advice isn’t automatic here, see what to know about selling a home in winter before you sit on a decision for four months.

FAQ: Home selling strategies

Here are answers to common questions about home selling strategies.

Can I negotiate my real estate agent’s commission?

Yes. Commission has always been negotiable, and since the 2024 NAR settlement changes it can no longer be advertised through the MLS, so buyer-side and seller-side compensation are now separate conversations you have in writing. Ask what services each percentage point buys, and get the term length and protection period in the same conversation. Our guide to how real estate agent commissions work explains what’s standard in Michigan.

Is selling without an agent actually worth it?

It depends on how much of the work you can absorb. FSBO saves the listing-side commission, roughly $8,750 – $10,500 on a $350,000 Michigan sale, but NAR’s own data has consistently shown FSBO homes selling for less than agent-assisted homes, and you take on pricing, marketing, disclosure, and negotiation yourself. It works best when you already have a buyer. See our guide to selling without a REALTOR® before you decide.

How long should I wait before dropping my price?

About two weeks. A listing gets its heaviest traffic in the first 7 – 10 days, so if you’ve had showings and no offers by day 14, or no showings at all by day 10, the market is telling you the price is wrong, not that buyers need more time. Check photos and access first, then adjust. Our guide to what to do if your home doesn’t sell walks the full triage.

Should I accept a cash offer that’s lower than a financed offer?

It depends on the gap. Cash removes the appraisal and financing contingencies and can close in 7 – 14 days instead of 30 – 45, which is worth real money if you’re carrying two housing payments. But a fully underwritten preapproval from a strong buyer is far more reliable than people assume. Read our comparison of selling to a cash buyer before you discount for certainty you may already have.

The bottom line on home selling strategies

A home selling strategy comes down to three decisions: who represents you, how the home gets marketed, and how you answer offers. Representation is the biggest line item you control. A listing-side commission commonly runs 2.5% – 3% of the sale price and is fully negotiable. Marketing is mostly photography and the first 7 – 10 days on market. And every offer gets judged on four axes: price, financing strength, contingencies, and timing, because the highest number that never closes was never the highest offer.

If you’re ready to sell and buy in the same season, talk to Align Lending, we’ll shop your next mortgage across our lender network and show you the numbers side by side before you sign anything. Call 248-506-5727 or start online today.

¹ Example figures are hypothetical and for educational purposes only; they do not constitute an advertisement of credit terms or a rate quote under federal or state lending laws. Your rate and terms will depend on your application and market conditions. Back to text

This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide legal, financial, or tax advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation. Align Lending works with FHA- and VA-approved lenders and is not acting on behalf of, endorsed by, or sponsored by FHA, HUD, or the Department of Veterans Affairs.