The commission is the number everybody quotes and it is not the total. Anyone comparing a cash buyer vs realtor in Lake City needs the full list, because four or five smaller line items usually add up to more than people expect, and the carrying months are invisible until you add them. None of this is an argument against using an agent. Josiah spent eleven years as a licensed realtor before he started buying houses directly, and there are plenty of houses where listing is clearly the right call. It is an argument for knowing your net before you decide.
What is the commission, actually?
Historically quoted around 5 to 6% of the sale price and split between the listing and buying sides. It has always been negotiable, and since the industry changes that took effect in 2024, buyer-side compensation is negotiated more explicitly rather than assumed. That means the number on your listing agreement is genuinely a conversation, and sellers who treat it as fixed leave money on the table.
What has not changed is that somebody usually pays the buyer’s agent, and if it is not you, the buyer folds it into what they can offer. Shifting who writes the check does not always change the economics.
What else comes out at closing?
The line items that surprise people, roughly in the order they appear on a settlement statement:
- Documentary stamp tax on the deed, customarily paid by the seller in most of Florida and calculated on the sale price
- Title insurance and closing fees, which vary by who pays what in your contract
- Prorated property taxes through the closing date, at 13.4997 mills in the unincorporated county or 19.2003 inside the Lake City limits
- Recording fees through the Clerk
- Any liens or open permits that have to be cleared before title will pass
- Buyer concessions, which in a market with 87 median days on market get asked for more often than they did two years ago
What about the repairs?
This is the item nobody budgets and it is frequently the largest one after commission. A financed buyer’s inspection produces a list, and in a balanced market they have enough leverage to ask.
Around here the list has a predictable shape, because nearly half the housing inside the city limits predates 1980. Cast iron drain lines, aluminum branch wiring in some mid-seventies builds, polybutylene supply line from the eighties and nineties, and additions somebody framed without a permit.
Then there is the roof, which is less a repair item than a gate. Citizens Property Insurance policies in Columbia County fell from 677 at the end of 2024 to 279 as of May 31, 2026, so private carriers write this market on their own terms and roof age decides whether your buyer can get a binder at all. A roof you did not plan to replace can become a condition of closing in week nine.
How much do the waiting months cost?
Median days on market across the Lake City area was 87 as of June 2026, up from 76 a year earlier, and that is listing to contract. Add thirty to forty-five days for a financed buyer to close. Call it four to five months from sign in the yard to money in the account.
Every one of those months costs you the mortgage payment, taxes, insurance, utilities, and maintenance. If the house is vacant, add the risk that something breaks with nobody there to notice, and the fact that many policies quietly narrow coverage after thirty or sixty days of vacancy.
This is the single biggest error people make weighing a cash buyer vs realtor in Lake City. People compare a listing price to a cash offer and forget that one of those numbers arrives in three weeks and the other arrives in five months, with five months of carrying costs deducted along the way.
A worked example, using round numbers
Illustration only, not a quote on any real property. Take a house that lists and sells at $200,000, which is near the county’s median owner-occupied value of $194,900 in the Census Bureau’s 2024 five-year estimates.
Commission at 5.5% is $11,000. Doc stamps, title, recording and closing costs might run a few thousand more. Say the inspection produces $6,000 of agreed repairs and the buyer asks for $3,000 in concessions. Four months of carrying costs on taxes, insurance and utilities on a vacant house is easily $3,000 to $4,000. Add it up and the seller nets somewhere in the neighborhood of $173,000 to $177,000 on a $200,000 sale.
Run your own version with your actual numbers. The point is not the specific figures, it is that the gap between headline price and net is routinely 12 to 15%, and almost nobody accounts for it when comparing offers.
So when is an agent still the right call?
More often than this article’s framing might suggest. A clean, well-maintained house in a decent subdivision with a newer roof will sell for meaningfully more on the open market than any cash buyer will pay, and that difference usually exceeds all the costs above combined. If that describes your house and you have the months, list it.
An agent also earns their fee on pricing, negotiation, and keeping a fragile deal alive, which matters more in a slower market than a hot one. Josiah is not going to badmouth a job he did for eleven years. The mismatch is situational, not professional.
The honest test is whether your house is the kind that shows well and inspects well. If a buyer walks through and finds nothing that scares them, the open market will reward that and no cash buyer can compete with it. If the inspection is going to produce a list, every month you spend on the open market is a month spent discovering that.
Where a direct sale actually wins
Choosing a cash buyer vs realtor in Lake City really turns on one thing: whether condition, complication, or a deadline is your actual constraint. No commission on either side, no repair negotiation, no appraisal, no concessions, no carrying months, and a closing date you choose. The headline number is lower and the net gap is much smaller than it looks.
Six years and more than a hundred houses in, Lake City Home Buyers has told plenty of sellers to go list it instead, and we will do that here if the numbers say so.
Getting your actual net number
Lake City Home Buyers tells every seller the same two things. Ask any agent for a written net sheet before you sign a listing agreement. Ask any cash buyer, including us, for the number you will actually receive at closing with nothing further deducted. Then compare those two figures rather than the headline ones, and factor in how many months each one takes.
If you want our side of that comparison, get a number and put it next to a net sheet. If the repair list is the thing driving the decision, this covers houses that need work.