How much does it cost to sell a house in Australia?

Most people ask me what a flip costs to buy and renovate, and almost nobody asks what it costs to sell. That is a mistake, because the cost to sell a house in Australia is bigger than first-timers expect, and on a flip it comes straight off the number that decides whether the whole exercise was worth it. You can buy well and renovate tightly, then hand back a chunk of your margin at the finish line simply because you never budgeted for the sell side.

So this post is the sell-side cost stack, laid out the way I model it before I ever make an offer. A flip only works if you know your net sale price, not your headline sale price, and the gap between those two is every cost below. This is general information rather than financial advice, so treat the numbers as a way to think rather than a quote for your deal.

What the cost to sell a house in Australia actually includes

When you sell, six things reach into your pocket: the agent's commission, the marketing campaign, conveyancing or legal fees, an auctioneer if you go that way, styling and pre-sale presentation, and then the tax the ATO takes on whatever profit is left. People remember the first one and forget the rest, which is how a "5% margin" quietly becomes a 2% one.

The single biggest cost to sell a house in Australia is almost always the agent's commission, so start there.

Agent commission: the big one

Agent commission is charged as a percentage of the final sale price, and there is no legislated rate, so everything is negotiable. According to PropertyNow's 2026 commission data, the national median sits around 2.65%, with most agents landing somewhere between 2% and 3%. It varies by state: New South Wales and Victoria run a median near 2.35%, while Queensland is higher at around 2.8%. Inner-city agents in Sydney and Melbourne often quote lower, in the 1.5% to 2% range, because the sale prices are large enough that even a small percentage is a big fee; regional agents charge more.

Put a number on it. On a $700,000 sale, 2.3% is roughly $16,100 and 2.8% is about $19,600. That single line is usually more than your stamp duty was on the way in, and it scales with your sale price, so a higher ARV means a bigger fee, not a free one. It is worth negotiating, and worth understanding what you are paying for, but do not assume the cheapest agent nets you the most. A good agent who gets a genuinely higher price earns their margin back many times over on a flip.

Marketing and advertising

Commission almost never includes marketing. That is a separate bill, and on a flip you are paying it to attract the buyer who pays your ARV, so it is not the place to cut to the bone. OpenAgent's 2026 cost guide puts marketing and advertising anywhere from around $600 for a bare-bones online listing to $10,000 for a full premium campaign, and notes that a proper auction campaign on a Sydney house can run $6,000 to $9,000 on its own.

What you are buying is the premium portal placement, professional photography, floorplans, signboard, and the online spend that gets your renovated home in front of the most buyers in the first two weeks, which is when the best offers come. For a flip I budget for a mid-range campaign rather than the cheapest tier, because a slightly bigger marketing spend that lifts the sale price by even one percent pays for itself several times over.

Conveyancing, legals and settlement costs

You need a conveyancer or solicitor to handle the contract of sale, the vendor's statement and settlement. On the sell side this typically runs from around $700 to $2,500 depending on the state and the complexity, per OpenAgent. It is a modest line next to commission, but skip it and you will feel it.

There are a couple of smaller settlement costs bundled in here too. Your lender will charge a mortgage discharge fee, usually a few hundred dollars, and if you took a fixed-rate loan to fund the flip you can be stung with break costs for repaying early. On a short-hold flip that is worth checking before you fix a rate, not after. One more settlement item is not a cost but a cash-flow trap: since 2025 you need an ATO clearance certificate on every sale or the buyer withholds 15% of the price, so sort it early.

Auctioneer fees

If you sell under the hammer, the auctioneer is a separate cost from your agent, generally in the region of $400 to $1,000 per OpenAgent. Whether an auction is worth it depends on the property and the market. I go through that decision in detail in auction versus private treaty for selling a flip; in a soft market a passed-in auction can hurt you, so the method matters as much as the fee.

Styling and presentation

Presentation is optional on paper and close to compulsory in practice, because a renovated house that photographs well and shows well sells for more. Property styling can run from a couple of thousand dollars for a part-stage of the key rooms to well over ten thousand for a full furnished home over a six-week campaign, scaling with the size of the house and the length of the hire. It is one of the few selling costs that reliably pays for itself when the numbers are done properly, and I make the case for it, with the caveats, in is property styling worth it when flipping a house.

The cost everyone forgets: tax

Here is the line that catches new flippers hardest. A genuine flip is not a capital gain, it is a business, so the profit is taxed as ordinary income at your marginal rate, and the 50% capital gains tax discount that buy-and-hold investors rely on does not apply. I unpack why in the post on the ATO's revenue versus capital account treatment of flips, and it is the most expensive thing to misunderstand about selling a flip. If you are in a high marginal bracket, the tax on your profit can be a larger number than every other selling cost added together, so it belongs in the model from day one, not as a surprise at tax time.

Adding it up on a real flip

Take a renovated house selling for $700,000, and assume a private-treaty sale with a mid-range campaign. Agent commission at roughly 2.3% is about $16,100, marketing around $5,000, conveyancing about $1,500, and styling about $5,000. That is roughly $27,600 in direct selling costs, or about 4% of the sale price, before the ATO takes its share of the profit. These figures are illustrative and every one of them moves with your state, your agent and your campaign, so run your own.

Four percent may not sound like much until you remember it comes off your margin, not your revenue. On a flip aiming for a $60,000 profit, nearly half of it can be sitting inside the selling costs, which is exactly why the 70% rule and every serious feasibility leave room for them. It is also why selling costs bite harder in a falling market, where a soft final price meets fixed selling costs and a squeezed margin all at once, and if the sale then stalls you need a plan for what to do when your flip won't sell. Costs are only half of the sell side; when you list matters too, and the best time of year to sell a house in Australia is worth planning into the deal from the buy.

Model your net sale price before you buy

The point of all this is not to scare you off selling. It is to get you underwriting to the right number. The price a buyer pays is not the money you keep; the money you keep is that price minus every cost above, minus the tax on what is left. That net figure is the only one that tells you whether a flip works.

So build it in early. Put your selling costs into your flip ROI calculator alongside your purchase and holding costs, and pressure-test the deal on the net-of-everything profit rather than the headline resale. If you want to see how the whole stack fits together on one deal, the sample analysis walks through a full set of numbers from offer to net profit. Selling costs are the last cost you pay and the easiest to forget, and they are exactly where a flip that looked fine on paper quietly loses its margin. For the complete picture of every cost across a flip, from purchase to sale, see how much it costs to flip a house in Australia.