Selling a home
By Katy Norman, licensed Minnesota Realtor · Updated
How to sell a house as is in Minnesota starts with one decision: price the home for the work it needs, and put that work in writing for buyers.
Selling as is means you are not making repairs before the sale.
It does not mean hiding what you know about the home.
Katy Norman helps sellers in Mound, around Lake Minnetonka, and across the west metro sell homes as is when fixing them first does not make sense.
Her background in real estate investing and home renovation shapes how she prices them: what a repair actually costs, not what a buyer guesses it costs.
An as-is sale tells buyers the price reflects the current condition.
The seller will not complete a repair list after an inspection.
Minnesota law still requires sellers to disclose material facts they know about the property.
A leaky roof you know about goes on the disclosure, as is or not.
As is changes who pays for the work.
It does not change what you have to tell buyers.
Selling as is usually fits when the timeline matters more than the last dollar of price.
A job relocation with a start date.
A divorce settlement with a sale deadline. Katy's scenario page on selling a house during a divorce in Minnesota covers that situation in detail.
A home you have owned for decades, where the repair list is longer than the time you want to spend on it.
Or a home where the honest math says repairs cost more than the price they would add.
Katy walks sellers through that math before anyone decides.
If light preparation would net more, she will say so.
Buyers discount as-is homes.
They price in the repairs they can see, and then they add room for the problems they cannot see.
That uncertainty discount is the real cost of selling as is, and it varies with the home, the repair list, and how many buyers compete for it.
You can shrink the discount with information.
Written repair estimates from real contractors tell buyers what the work actually costs.
A complete disclosure and a clean, emptied home make the unknown feel smaller.
Pricing from recent comparable sales matters more on an as-is home than on any other kind. The Norman Homes guide to finding out what your home is worth explains how that number gets built.
Cash buying companies advertise heavily for as-is homes.
Their offer is fast, and it is usually the lowest number the home will see, because their margin comes out of your price.
Listing the home as is on the open market puts it in front of every buyer at once: owner-occupants, landlords, and investors.
More buyers looking at the same repair list usually means a better price for the seller.
The Norman Homes breakdown of the ways to sell your home compares these routes side by side.
Katy's renovation background helps here in a practical way.
She can look at a kitchen, a roof, or a mechanical system and estimate what a buyer will actually spend, so the asking price is built on real numbers instead of fear.
Get written estimates for the big items, even if you never do the work.
Clean the home out. An empty as-is home reads as a project. A full one reads as a burden.
Complete the Minnesota seller disclosure honestly and in full.
Take photos that show the home as it is. Buyers who are surprised at a showing do not come back with offers.
Price it from comparable sales, adjusted for condition, and be ready to explain the adjustment.