Selling and buying without an agent in Vermont

Who runs your closing

Vermont is an attorney state. No statute orders you to hire a lawyer to sell your own house, but a Vermont attorney runs the great majority of residential closings, and the work that makes a closing happen is legal work. The attorney examines title in the town land records, gives the title opinion the insurer relies on, drafts the deed, holds and disburses the money, and gets the deed recorded. Title and escrow companies exist here, but the Vermont Bar Association’s ethics opinions treat their work as law related services under the attorney rules.

Budget for a lawyer of your own, and expect the buyer to have one, because a single attorney is not going to represent both of you. The bar’s ethics committee has said it is not appropriate to represent both seller and buyer in the same transaction, and a related opinion tells the buyer’s attorney that when the seller is unrepresented, the only legal advice that lawyer may give you is to go get your own. Read that as a warning label. The buyer’s counsel usually handles the title work and the closing at the lender’s insistence, while your attorney reviews the contract and prepares the deed. That seller side engagement prices well below a commission.

Hire early. Vermont title chains run through town land records rather than a county recorder, and older parcels carry rights of way, shared driveways, and boundary descriptions written before anyone surveyed them. Give your attorney a month rather than a week. One mechanical point: the town clerk cannot record your deed unless a completed property transfer tax return, Form PTT-172, comes with it.

What you must disclose

Vermont has no general seller disclosure statute and no state issued disclosure form. The background rule is common law: you may not conceal a known material defect or misrepresent the condition of the property, and answering a buyer’s direct question falsely is where sellers get into trouble. That buyer beware half of the picture still holds.

The flood half is not. 27 V.S.A. Section 380, effective June 17, 2024 and amended in 2025, requires the seller of real property, prior to or as part of the contract for conveyance, to give the buyer three things: a copy or digital link of the community’s FEMA flood insurance rate map, or notice that no map is in effect; whether the property flooded or suffered flood damage while you owned it, including damage from inundation or from flood related erosion or landslide; and whether you maintain, or must by law maintain, flood insurance. The remedies have teeth. A buyer who does not get the disclosure may terminate the contract before transfer of title or occupancy, whichever comes first, and may sue for damages and reasonable attorney’s fees, with punitive damages if you knowingly failed to disclose. The statute does protect a seller who passes along an error from a public body or a licensed professional whose written report you reasonably believed. Vermont’s Flood Ready program publishes an optional fillable form and a guide to gathering the information.

Water and wastewater is the other thing that reliably surfaces. Under 10 V.S.A. Section 1973 a state permit is required before subdividing land, building, or changing a building in a way that increases design flow, so a finished basement or added bedroom from a prior owner can turn out to be unpermitted. The buyer’s attorney will go looking, so pull your permit file, septic design, and well records before you list. Vermont Realtors publishes a seller’s property information form that many owners fill out voluntarily; nothing requires it, and if you use one, answer only from what you know. Federal lead paint rules still apply to housing built before 1978.

Transfer taxes

Vermont has a property transfer tax, and it is a substantial one. The general rate is 1.25 percent of the value transferred. For a buyer who will use the property as a principal residence, it is 0.5 percent on the first $200,000 and 1.25 percent above that. When the property is fit for year round habitation, will not be the buyer’s principal residence, and is not a long-term rental, the rate is 3.4 percent. The clean water surcharge, which the Department of Taxes publishes at 0.22 percent, applies on top, though not to the first $200,000 of a principal residence.

Here is the part that surprises people from other states. The tax is the buyer’s, not yours. Section 9604 makes it the liability of the transferee unless the parties agree otherwise, and the Department’s own instructions repeat it. It will not come out of your proceeds, but it shapes how your buyers do their math. On a $400,000 sale, a buyer moving in pays about $3,940 in tax and surcharge, while a buyer treating the same house as a second home pays about $14,480. If your property reads as a vacation purchase, that gap affects who can afford your price and how hard they push on it.

One tax item is genuinely yours. If you are a nonresident of Vermont at closing, 32 V.S.A. Section 5847 requires the buyer to withhold 2.5 percent of the consideration and send it to the Commissioner of Taxes within 30 days, on Form RW-171. It is a prepayment against your Vermont income tax on the gain rather than an extra tax, and it does not apply if you furnish a certificate of Vermont residency or one from the Commissioner showing no tax is due. Sort that out before the settlement table, since a buyer who fails to withhold is personally liable and will not carry that risk for you.

The bottom line for doing it yourself

Selling without an agent in Vermont works, but be honest about its shape. You cannot run the closing yourself the way you might in an escrow state, because the title opinion, the deed, and the money all move through a lawyer. Treat that as help rather than a toll: the attorney carries mechanics that would otherwise be yours, at a fraction of a commission.

Your own work is pricing, marketing, and paperwork discipline. Get the flood disclosure into the buyer’s hands before or with the contract and keep proof of it. Collect wastewater and potable water permits, septic and well records early. Line up your attorney before you have an offer, and do not lean on the buyer’s lawyer for advice, since that lawyer is not allowed to give it. Remember that the transfer tax lands on your buyer, and that living out of state means planning for the withholding. This is general information rather than legal advice, and one conversation with a Vermont real estate attorney is the way to pressure test anything unusual about your property.