Selling Your Triplex Quickly [2 Best Ways]

Selling a 3-unit property can be tricky, as most potential buyers prefer single-family homes and condos.

Even when you find a buyer, they might simply want to purchase a single unit rather than the entire property. It would take three such transactions and the headache of splitting the property title.

As a result, selling a 3-unit rental home can take lots of time and effort if you market it the traditional way. However, this shouldn’t necessarily be the case.

You can sell a whole triplex at once to the right buyer—a real estate investor who is buying it to rent it out.

There are real estate investors who buy rental properties fast and for cash as a service. They look for small multifamily properties to repair and resell (fix and flip), or to rent them out.

Additionally, investors buy homes in their current condition, which means they will make an offer on your triplex even if it’s an old property that needs work.

How Does Selling to a Real Estate Investor Work?

The usual process of selling your triplex to a cash house buying company is as follows:

1. Request a cash offer from an investor.
2. Schedule a property walkthrough with the cash buyer so they can assess the condition and decide how much they can offer for your triplex.
3. Evaluate the offer made by your investor. If you are dealing with a skilled professional, you will often receive an offer within 24 hours of the house viewing.
4. Sign the contract if you’re happy with the offer. The investor will put the money in escrow and begin working towards closing.
5. Finalize the deal and close. If the property doesn’t have liens, title problems, or other complications, closing can often be done in under two weeks. You will receive your cash as soon as the bank processes the transaction. It may take a day or two.

Pros and Cons of Selling a Triplex to a Real Estate Investor

Working with a professional cash buyer when selling your triplex has several benefits:

• These investors buy properties as is, so you don’t have to make repairs to sell your triplex. This saves you loads of time and money in the sale process.
• You can avoid paying high real estate agent commissions. Investors oversee the entire sale, which means you don’t need a realtor in the transaction.
• Investors purchase homes for cash, eliminating the time-consuming process of mortgage application and approval. This speeds up the sale of your triplex considerably.
• Cash house buyers close fast, as they don’t have to wait for lender-required inspections and appraisals, unlike most purchasers. You can often close within a couple of weeks when you work with a company that buys houses fast.
• Real estate investors cover all closing costs, reducing your overall expenses in the sale.
  Working with an investor to sell your 3-family home ensures minimal bureaucracy since you skip all the formalities required by lenders and real estate agents.

While there are numerous upsides to selling your home privately, there’s one major drawback:

• The cash offer you receive could be less than what the property is actually worth.

However, there’s a good reason for this: investors have to factor in repair and upgrade costs, closing fees, and their profit margin when reselling the property.

Furthermore, if you consider the realtor commissions you avoid and the closing costs for home sellers paid by the buyer, the amount of cash you walk away with may be close to what you’d get from a traditional sale.

Where to Find a Good Real Estate Investor

When selling your house to an investor, you have to find a local professional with experience, good reputation, and proper industry ethics.

At HouseCashin, we’ve built a huge network of seasoned home buying professionals who purchase properties across the country.

All our partner investors have been carefully screened for experience and adherence to proper ethical practices throughout their real estate investment careers.

You can sell your triplex fast and easily by submitting an online form to get multiple cash offers on your house now.

Once sent, review the cash offers from investors in your area. You may receive one or several, depending on your real estate market.

There are no charges for requesting or receiving an offer. Additionally, you’re under no obligation to accept any cash offer you receive.

When you get a satisfying offer, you can accept it and work toward closing, which usually takes one or two weeks if you are selling your three-family home urgently and need to close really fast.

Another way you can sell a 3-unit rental home is by selling it the standard way: listing and marketing it to the general public.

To market it, you can advertise on online marketplaces, in print media, social media, and through other ways.

For the traditional sale option, there are two approaches to consider:

• Sell the property by yourself (FSBO sale). Here, you should be prepared to manage every step of the sale, from prepping the house for selling to price negotiations and closing.
• Hire a real estate agent to facilitate the entire sale process. They will do almost everything for you. As for what you are required to do personally (such as filling out a disclosure), they will show you how to do it.

Note that a traditional home sale (whether you sell as a FSBO or via a realtor) is much more time-consuming than a sale to a cash property buyer. However, you might get the highest possible price for your property.

That said, you still need a real estate investor if you want to sell a whole triplex at once. Your buyer should be someone willing to buy the entire property as a rental investment.

You can also try to sell each part of the triplex separately, as if you were selling a townhome unit or selling a condo.

In this case, you’d need to find out (or ask your agent about) the legalities of splitting the title of your residential property into three separate titles for each of the units.

You would also need to facilitate three separate sales, which would further prolong the whole thing.

In the following sections, we’ll break down the process of selling traditionally and why it takes longer than selling to a company that buys houses.

Prepare the Property

One of the most distinguishing aspects of a traditional sale is that you have to prepare the property before you can put it up for sale. This involves making repairs, renovations, and upgrades if your triplex requires them.

Typical buyers usually request repairs for the following reasons:

• Multifamily property buyers and landlords need a commercial mortgage to buy property, yet most lenders won’t finance a house that’s in poor condition. As a result, the buyers cannot purchase homes in poor condition, even if they’re willing to deal with repairs.
• Most landlords want turnkey rentals that can begin generating income immediately.
• Those who are buying a unit for themselves also mostly want a home that’s in good condition and ready to live in.

For these reasons, you may have to renovate your triplex. You also have to clean it, stage it, and take professional photos that will be used for marketing.

If the market is active enough, you can go without professional photography and staging. Otherwise, it makes a big difference.

What Does a Traditional Real Estate Sale Entail?

If you decide to sell by yourself, you will be responsible for managing the entire sale, including finding repair contractors, advertising the property on major for-sale-by-owner websites, price negotiations, and dealing with all the required paperwork.

If you choose to work with an agent, they will handle every step of the sale.

But the selling process is the same whether you opt for a realtor or sell by yourself:

1. Evaluate what’s damaged and the degree of damage when selling a house in disrepair. Work with professional contractors to assess the condition and estimate repair costs.
2. Determine a suitable price tag for the property. Based on the history of property sales in your location, an agent will conduct a CMA (comparative market analysis) to establish a fair asking price.

   If you’re selling by yourself, use property valuation tools online (such as our home value calculator) and look at the asking prices of similar properties currently sold nearby on real estate sites.

3. Prepare the property for sale by doing repairs and cleaning it afterward.
4. Advertise the property. A real estate agent will list the house on the local MLS (a web database for Realtors that lists properties for sale, giving buyers’ agents information about your triplex) and major listing platforms such as Zillow, Opendoor, Realtor.com, and Redfin.

   When selling by yourself, list your property on popular FSBO listing services such as the online real estate marketplace by Real Estate Bees and HouseCashin investment property marketplace.

5. Review and counter offers: Compare the different offers you receive, negotiate with the prospects, and choose the best deal possible.
6. Professional inspection and appraisal: Buyers funding the transaction by using loans need inspections and appraisals for mortgage approval.

   If the property is found to have a market value that’s lower than your asking price after appraisal, you may need to adjust your price. Otherwise, the lender won’t issue a loan on the property.

7. Find a title company to handle paperwork and title search and transfer. Schedule a closing date once the title search is done.
8. Close on the property and receive the money in your bank account within a couple of days after closing.

Pros and Cons of Selling a Triplex Traditionally

The following are the pros of selling your triplex the classic way:

• Your agent (if they are managing your sale) facilitates every step of the process, allowing you to avoid the headaches and bureaucracies of selling traditionally. Agents protect the seller’s best interests.
• You can sell the property at its actual market value. However, this hugely depends on your or your agent’s experience and negotiating skills.

There are also several drawbacks to selling your triplex traditionally:

• Agent commission is high, coming to about 3% to 6% of the final sale price, which reduces your take-home amount.
• Property renovations, repairs, and other preparations are expensive and time-consuming.
• In addition to the time required for repairs and marketing, traditional sales last for much longer than a quick sale to an investor. This is especially true if you’re selling by yourself and have no experience selling a 3-unit property.
• The inspections and appraisals required by lenders further prolong the sale.
• Regular home buyers are generally picky when it comes to the homes they want. This causes a lengthy and stressful negotiation process, even for the most experienced sellers.

Now that you know the different ways to sell your property, the next step would be comparing how much you can get for it by selling to a real estate investor versus using a real estate agent.

To do this, find a few local professionals and compare their offers. When talking to a real estate agent, don’t forget to ask for a quote on their commission, in addition to the estimated property price.

And as for real estate investors, request quick no-obligation quotes and compare the offers coming from reputable professional cash buyers working in your area.