Selling and buying without an agent in Nebraska

Nebraska is a workable state to sell in on your own. A title company handles the closing, one published form satisfies the disclosure duty, and the tax you pay at recording can be figured to the dollar before you list.

Who runs your closing

Nebraska closings run through title and escrow companies rather than through lawyers. No statute puts an attorney in a residential sale, and the ordinary transaction in Omaha, Lincoln, or a county seat out west is handled end to end by a title company: it searches title, issues the owner’s and lender’s policies, holds the earnest money and the loan proceeds, prepares the settlement statement, and delivers the deed to the register of deeds for recording. The state’s own paperwork assumes this, since the transfer statement filed with every deed asks whether the sale went through a real estate agent or a title company. Before you sign, ask your closer how the earnest money will be held and keep the answer in writing.

Recording has one Nebraska specific step. Every deed handed to a register of deeds must arrive with a completed Form 521, Real Estate Transfer Statement, and the instructions tell the register not to record the deed unless items 1 through 27 are complete and signed. The grantee signs it, meaning your buyer or their authorized representative, though in practice the closing agent fills it out from the file. It captures the sale date, the parties, the legal description, the total purchase price including liabilities the buyer assumes, and the value of anything in that price that is not real property. Get that last figure itemized and attached, because line 24 subtracts it and the stamp tax runs on what remains.

If your property sits in the western panhandle, Form 521 asks something unusual: whether the land lies in an area with an active air force ballistic missile field, which triggers a separate affidavit under Neb. Rev. Stat. 76-2,141. The Department of Revenue names all of Banner, Cheyenne, Kimball, and Scotts Bluff counties, plus described portions of Deuel, Garden, Morrill, and Sioux. The affidavit is the purchaser’s to sign. Everywhere else you check no and move on. A lawyer stays optional, and earns the fee on a land contract, a parcel split, or acreage with wells, septic, and mineral or irrigation rights.

What you must disclose

Nebraska’s duty is statutory, not a matter of custom. Neb. Rev. Stat. 76-2,120 requires a seller of residential real property, meaning one to four dwelling units, to give the buyer a completed written disclosure statement, with the buyer acknowledging receipt in writing, on or before the effective date of any contract that binds the buyer to purchase. That timing is the part people get wrong: the disclosure belongs in your buyer’s hands before signatures, not later alongside the inspection report. It applies whether or not a licensee is involved. If you learn before that date that an answer is no longer accurate, you update the statement.

Read the exemptions before you assume the duty is yours. The statute lists transfers it does not reach, among them sales by a fiduciary administering an estate or trust unless that fiduciary occupied the home, foreclosure and trustee sales, transfers between spouses under a divorce decree, transfers to a relative in the direct lineal line, transfers to or from a governmental entity, and newly built property never occupied. If you inherited the house and are selling as personal representative, check where you fall first.

The form is the Nebraska Real Estate Commission’s Seller Property Condition Disclosure Statement, four pages, carrying a 1/2017 revision date, prescribed by Title 302, Chapter 1 of the Commission’s rules. Part I grids appliances, electrical, heating and cooling, water, and sewer systems as working, not working, do not know, or none; carbon monoxide alarms sit in the electrical section. Part II carries the substance: structural items like roof leaks, basement water intrusion, and settling; environmental items including asbestos, lead based paint, radon gas, storage tanks, and any notice from the Noxious Weed Control Authority in the past three years; title items covering shared driveways, easements, encroachments, zoning violations, and any private transfer fee obligation on sale; plus flood plain location, radon mitigation, and the last year you serviced a septic system or tested well water.

Radon appears twice, once as presence and once as mitigation, so answer both. The disclosure has teeth. A buyer who does not receive a compliant statement has a cause of action for actual damages, court costs, and attorney’s fees, brought within one year after the buyer takes possession or the property is conveyed, whichever comes first. The statute does not hold you responsible for an error outside your personal knowledge, and it lets you answer that you do not know. That is honest when true and a dodge when it is not. If you have paperwork on a repair or a test, reference it in the Part III comments and hand it over.

Transfer taxes

Nebraska charges a documentary stamp tax when a deed is recorded. The tax falls on the grantor, meaning you as the seller, and the county register of deeds collects it. The rate is $3.32 for each $1,000 of value, or fraction of $1,000, effective July 18, 2026. It replaced a $2.32 rate that had run since September 2025, so quotes and calculators built earlier in the year will understate what you owe. Because a partial thousand counts as a whole one, divide the price by 1,000, round up, then multiply by $3.32. On a $300,000 sale that is 300 units and $996.

The taxable value is the purchase price including liabilities the buyer assumes, less documented non real property. All deeds are presumed taxable unless it clearly appears on the face of the deed, or sufficient proof is presented, that the transfer is exempt, and the exemption number goes on line 25 of Form 521. Recording fees are separate and charged per page. At about a third of a percent of price, the stamp tax is real money but still below what sellers pay in most eastern states.

The bottom line for doing it yourself

Nebraska asks little of a seller that an agent would otherwise absorb. The closing belongs to a title company that does the work whether or not a broker is involved, the disclosure duty is met with one form, and the tax at recording is predictable before you list. Line up a title company early and let them handle the deed and Form 521.

What stays yours is pricing, negotiating, and filling out that disclosure carefully, early enough to hand over before the contract is signed. The one year window for a buyer’s claim is short but real, and a careless answer about a wet basement or a radon result is what ends up in it. Confirm the current stamp tax rate with your closer rather than an old estimate, and keep receipts for anything you disclose. This is general information about how the process works here, and a lawyer is worth an hour if your sale has a wrinkle.