Listing a tenanted home on OFFE is free, and the one fee is $500 + GST at settlement, paid from the proceeds only if the home sells to a buyer from OFFE. There is no sign, no open home and no agency agreement. Here is what changes when a tenant lives in the home you want to sell, and where an off market sale fits.
What changes when a tenant is in the home
Four things tend to shift: notice, access for inspections, the lease and the buyer.
- Notice. Rules about entering a rented home differ from state to state, and a sale inspection typically has to work within them.
- Access. A tenant who feels disrupted may make inspections harder. Limited access can put buyers off, and that can affect the price.
- The lease. A lease does not usually end just because a sale is under way. A buyer may take the home on with the tenant in place, or may want it empty. The rules for ending a tenancy vary by state and lease type, so check the ones that apply to you.
- The buyer. Some buyers want a reliable tenant already paying rent. Others need to move in themselves.
That last point is why owners often decide early between selling tenanted and selling vacant. The answer depends on the market the home sits in, because different markets draw different buyers. Where owner occupiers dominate, timing a sale around the end of a lease can widen the pool. Where investors are active, a tenant in place can be a selling point.
Does selling off market make it easier on a tenant?
It can, because an off market sale on OFFE has no open homes, so there is no run of public inspections for the tenant to plan around. The owner decides who walks through the home and when, which is one of the six terms every OFFE owner sets before anyone makes an offer.
Those six terms are when you sell, your settlement length, your price, who walks through, whether the listing ever touches a public portal, and extras like rent back. For a tenanted home, the walk through term and the portal term do most of the work. You can keep viewings to people who have already shown real interest, and the home is never advertised on the public portals unless you choose that.
Setting terms a buyer can read first
Buyers register free on OFFE to see every home, the full address, and to make an offer or request a chat. An owner with a tenant in place can write their settlement length and any rent back arrangement into the listing, so buyers see those terms before they get in touch.
Nothing binds until a contract is signed. An owner can see what buyers would actually offer before deciding anything, and if the right offer does not come, no agency agreement has been signed and nothing is owed.
OFFE is a marketplace, not an agent, so it does not negotiate with your tenant or your buyer on your behalf. If you want licensed help with the contract or a negotiation, that is an optional $2,000 + GST. The full breakdown of what OFFE costs sets out all three ways to sell.
Related pages
This article draws on the following pages.