In this wildly energetic market, where houses pretty much sell themselves, it’s hard to resist the urge to take matters into your own hands. A real estate agent’s commission—typically ringing in at about five per cent of the sale price—is the single biggest cost for the seller, averaging $25,000 for a $500,000 place.

With the DIY approach, the idea is that the seller subtracts the agent’s commission from the sale price, undercuts the market and gets a quick sale. Web-based companies like privaterealestate.ca, propertysold.ca and the leading one, bytheowner.com, with listing fees that range from $60 to $595, are cropping up to cash in on the demand. Bytheowner has been operating since 1997 but opened its first dedicated Toronto office in January. The site’s sales in the city have increased from 46 homes in 2005 to 81 last year.

Jennifer Eisen, a career coach, is selling her Front Street penthouse condo privately. She’s listed it for $739,000 with Privatereal estate and Propertysold, but she doesn’t recommend this route for everyone. “I’ve got a pretty flexible schedule. If you have to work nine to five and can only show evenings and weekends, that could present problems. You can’t have somebody wait a week to see your home.”

While sellers who decide to do it for themselves will have to invest a fair amount of time, they won’t be going it totally alone—most sites employ commission-based reps (they get a portion of the listing fee rather than a portion of the selling price). They’ll go over the basics of selling real estate with the owner, give them a sign and open-house placard and help them put their listing up. But there’s a limit to how much help the sites can provide. Setting a market price—one that will encourage bidding wars or, at the very least, ensure a quick sale—isn’t easy when it’s your own home. “The price is always the thing,” says Magda Swietochowska, a Toronto Bytheowner rep. “People tend to get a little bit greedy when they’re doing it on their own, but the house is not going to sell for more than it’s worth.”

Perhaps as a result, local agents don’t seem to be panicking just yet. “I wouldn’t go to a dentist without dental training, and I think real estate’s in the same category,” says Maureen O’Neill, president of the Toronto Real Estate Board. While her view isn’t exactly surprising—O’Neill has been in real estate for 27 years—she’s got a point. The reasons to sell your own house are obvious, but so are the reasons more than 90 per cent of houses are still sold by agents. The average time it takes to sell a house through MLS is 29 days. At Bytheowner, it’s 80. MLS.ca gets between 1.7 and 3 million unique visitors per month. Bytheowner and Propertysold get 680,000 and 240,000 respectively.

As such operations get bigger and more professional, however, there’s little doubt owner sales will continue to increase—the potential savings are just too attractive. In Edmonton, comfree.com already has nearly half the number of listings as MLS. But there will always be that other half of the equation—the buyer. It’s like O’Neill says: “The reason people sell on their own is that they want to save the commission; the buyer is trying to save that commission, too.” They can’t both save it, and to hear proud sellers describe how much they saved, it sounds like they’re not yet in the habit of splitting the difference.