Todd talks about how to go about canceling your listing if you have changed your mind about selling the house.

Hello! Welcome to Todd Miller TV. Today’s episode is what happens if you put your house in the market and then change your mind? You decide you don’t want to sell. It happens quite often. Your events in your life change or whatever. You just say hey look, we don’t want to sell now.

So what happens? Can you just get out of the listing? Well, that’s the question. So there are two sorts of things. I would separate it based on, “Are you under contract?” Meaning did you tell a buyer you will sell the house to them and then signed a contract saying you will do that? Because if you did, you may have problems.

The buyer can say we have an agreement to sell the house and if you cancel that and damage somehow, then they could file a lawsuit specific for performance essentially.

So the question is – that point is more difficult. Now before that, it’s a lot easier. So what you do is you just go to your agent and say hey look, events change. That job I lost I got back or I got this other job and I want to keep the house now or whatever the reason is that you were selling that is now no longer there.

So how should you best do this? Well, the first thing is, is read through your listing agreement. The listing agreement may say you can cancel it but you can’t relist it with another agent because they’re afraid that you will just cancel and then relist with somebody else and they won’t earn anything. So check that.

Also there may be a cancelation fee. So the agent may say hey look, you can cancel this thing anytime, but you got to pay me 1000 bucks or 500 bucks or 1500 or whatever. Just throw a number in there.

That’s because they actually do spend time and money paying for a photographer, putting a sign up, a lock box. They maybe have an assistant that works for them they have to pay or they’re just spending time working for you and then they do all this work for the commission at the end.

So they do this work. They get the house going. They do marketing. Maybe they start negotiating offers. Then you change your mind.

So check for cancelation fees that may be in there. A tactic to use, a nice thing to do would be say, look, we want to cancel. We promise though if we ever list a house again, we will let you list it because you were so great just letting us out of the listing. But we just can’t do it right now. We’re just not in the position or events, circumstances changed. We changed our mind, whatever.

Just be cool to the agent. But if circumstances change, they change and if your agent is really good about it, and they understand. Ultimately it’s whatever you put in writing. If you put in writing there was a fee, you’re going to have to pay it. If you’re on a contract with a buyer, it gets trickier. But hey, if the buyer will agree, and then the other – and the both agents agree to not try to collect commission for the work they’ve done, and they get it all in writing saying to cancel the deal, you can do it.

So it is possible to cancel escrow. It’s possible to cancel your listing agreement if you change your mind. So the bottom line is really the way to make this work is be open with everybody. Communicate with everybody. Explain the reasons why and then ask for – to get out of it and if you have a fee to pay, you have a fee to pay.

So anyway, that is my update for today. I hope to see you on another video. Thanks.