What it really costs to sell a home in Uganda

Ask five Ugandan sellers what they paid an agent and you will get five answers. Commission here is negotiated, not published, and it is normally a percentage of the sale price. That structure has one striking feature: the fee grows with the value of your house even though the work does not.

What selling a house actually involves

• Pricing it — comparing recent sales and asking prices in the same area.
• Photographs and a written description.
• Advertising it where buyers are looking.
• Answering enquiries, filtering out the unserious, and arranging viewings.
• Conducting viewings and following up.
• Handling offers and negotiating.
• Coordinating with lawyers, surveyors and any lender until completion.

Read that list again and ask which item becomes three times harder because the house is worth three times more. The photographs are the same job. The viewings take the same afternoon. The phone calls are the same phone calls. There is a real difference in the negotiation and in the calibre of buyer to be found, but it is nothing like proportional.

A percentage fee prices your agent's work according to your family's wealth, not according to the work.

The arithmetic of a percentage

Take a home priced at UGX 500,000,000 — a realistic figure for a good family house in a well-served Kampala suburb. At a 3% commission, the fee is UGX 15,000,000. At 5%, it is UGX 25,000,000. That money comes out of the equity you were planning to put into the next house, the school fees, or the business. Those percentages are illustrative rather than a published market rate, because no such published rate exists in Uganda — but they are the range sellers are routinely quoted.

A fixed fee inverts the question. Instead of asking what proportion of your home the agent should take, it asks what the job is worth. Our packages start at a published fixed fee and do not change with your asking price. On the same UGX 500,000,000 house, the difference is not a rounding error — it is most of a plot of land.

The other costs, which are real and worth paying

Commission is not the only cost of selling, and the rest of the list deserves respect rather than avoidance.

• Legal fees for preparing and executing the sale and transfer documents.
• A survey, if the boundary needs confirming or the plot is being subdivided.
• Outstanding ground rent, ground rates or property taxes, cleared before transfer.
• Consents where required — spousal consent on family land, a landlord's consent on leasehold or kibanja.
• Modest preparation costs: repairs, paint, clearing the compound, tidying the approach.
• Capital gains tax, which can apply where the property is a business or investment asset rather than your home. Take advice on your own position.

Stamp duty and registration on the transfer are ordinarily borne by the buyer, but who pays what is one of the terms of the deal, so agree it in writing rather than assuming.

Why an unclear fee costs you twice

An undisclosed or shared commission does more damage than its size suggests. If two or three intermediaries are quietly splitting a fee, the incentive is to close any sale rather than the best sale, and to keep buyer and seller apart. Sellers discover this when a low offer is presented enthusiastically and a better enquiry never arrives.

The remedy is not distrust. It is documentation: one written instruction, one named party, one stated fee, and a rule that any other person involved must be disclosed to you.

What to insist on before you instruct anyone

• The fee in writing, in shillings, with what is included and when it is payable.
• Whether the instruction is exclusive, and for how long.
• Whether anyone else will share the fee, and who.
• How the property will be advertised, and where.
• How and when you will hear about enquiries and offers — a weekly written update is not much to ask.
• What happens if you withdraw, and what happens if the sale falls through after an offer.

Selling a home is a large financial event in most Ugandan families' lives, and it is nearly always done under time pressure — a move, a school year, a business need. The single best protection is boring: get the fee and the terms on paper before anything else happens.