In a market with high interest rates and fewer qualified buyers, price reductions have become the default move for agents trying to generate activity on a listing. The problem is that price drops rarely fix the underlying issue: the pool of buyers who can qualify for a traditional mortgage has shrunk significantly. A large and overlooked segment of highly qualified buyers, mostly self-employed, simply cannot get approved through conventional lending regardless of how much cash they have in the bank.
Having a Seller financing strategy gives listing agents a different lever to pull. Rather than cutting the price, agents can market an attractive interest rate that pulls self-employed, high-net-worth buyers off the sidelines and back into the buyer pool. Ryan Leahy, founder of More Seller Financing and a 25-year lending veteran, has spent the last three years standardizing this process so that any listing agent can use it. This post breaks down exactly how it works, who it is right for, and how it can help you win listings your competitors can’t touch.
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32% of all mortgage applicants are declined not because of poor credit or lack of funds, but because their income doesn’t fit the traditional lending box. Most of them are self-employed, and the way the tax code works for business owners means their reportable income looks much lower than their actual financial position.
Consider a buyer earning $175,000 at a W-2 job and an additional $250,000 from a consulting company, with $500,000 ready to put down on a $1.5M home. That buyer may be declined by a traditional lender because the bank cannot count the consulting income under conventional underwriting rules. From a risk standpoint, that person is a highly qualified buyer. From a bank’s standpoint, they don’t fit the box.
Business bank statement programs exist for situations like this, but they’re often priced at 7.5% to 8%, which pushes those buyers back out of the market on rate alone. Seller financing solves the problem by letting the seller act as the lender at a negotiated rate that’s competitive with where the market was two to three years ago.
Seller financing is a transaction structure where the home seller acts as the lender, holding a mortgage note directly with the buyer instead of the buyer obtaining a bank loan. Its bad reputation among agents comes from 20 years of the strategy being misused, not from any fundamental problem with the approach.
From roughly 1978 through 2002, seller financing was widely used by highly qualified buyers. During periods when banks were quoting rates of 13% to 18%, buyers went directly to sellers for financing at lower, negotiated rates. In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, one out of every three transactions between 1980 and 1983 was a seller-financed deal.
When interest rates fell to 6% in 2002, there was no longer a reason for qualified buyers or sellers to bother with seller financing. For the next 20 years, the strategy was largely abandoned by the mainstream market and kept alive mostly in low-price, distressed transactions where it was often structured poorly. That’s where the reputation problem came from. Ryan Leahy’s work at More Seller Financing has been to take the best practices from conventional lending and apply them to seller financing so that it works cleanly for million-dollar listings with well-qualified buyers and sellers.
The most important thing to understand is that seller financing is a marketing program first, not a commitment to complete a seller-financed deal. When an agent adds seller financing to a listing, they’re advertising an attractive interest rate (often 3.99% to 5.99%) that draws qualified buyers who would otherwise scroll past the listing entirely. The seller never has to finalize a seller-financed transaction if a stronger conventional offer comes in.
Here’s how the process works in practice:
The average down payment across More Seller Financing transactions is 25%, and almost all deals close at full list price. Buyers in these transactions are competing on down payment amount rather than negotiating the price down.
A Compass agent in a premium market had a brand-new $1.6M listing that sat for 90 days with zero offers. He pulled it from the market to reassess. After finding More Seller Financing, he re-introduced the listing at the same $1.6M price, the only change being the addition of seller financing at 5.99%.
By Wednesday of that week, two highly qualified self-employed buyers had submitted offers. Both were pre-approved and verified through the program. By Friday, the seller was under contract at full price with 35% down, and the deal closed in 14 days. No price reduction. No extended negotiation. The seller, who originally wanted 20% down, received 35% down because two buyers were competing for the same property.
That seller held the note for 18 months, collecting over $5,000 per month in cash flow, and later sold the note for a lump-sum payout. For an agent trying to win more listings in a tight market, having a documented case study like this changes the listing presentation entirely.
Sellers are protected through a signed deed in lieu of foreclosure, which automatically transfers the property back to the seller if the buyer misses two payments, bypassing the formal foreclosure process entirely.
When two payments are missed (whether consecutive or cumulative), the deed transfers back to the seller. The situation then becomes an eviction matter rather than a foreclosure. In practice, the seller financing specialist facilitates a “cash for keys” resolution: the seller offers the departing buyer a cash payment (typically around $10,000) to vacate cleanly, with the funds held at the title company until the property is confirmed in good condition.
Two additional protections matter to agents specifically:
For agents who’ve hesitated to mention seller financing at a listing appointment out of concern about legal complexity, the third-party specialist model removes that barrier entirely.
Only 1% of agents currently introduce seller financing to their sellers, but 52% of sellers who go through the full presentation agree to offer it. That gap is the opportunity.
Agents using this strategy have reported winning listings against more experienced competitors simply by being the only agent in the room with a marketing tool beyond price reductions. When a seller has been watching their home sit on the market and has already bought their next property, being able to say “I have a program that can attract qualified buyers at a below-market rate, and you don’t have to commit to seller financing unless a qualifying buyer comes through,” is a meaningfully different conversation.
The sweet spot for the program is listings priced between $800,000 and $5 million, though deals have been completed as low as $275,000, including non-warrantable condos in markets like Florida, Colorado, and California where sellers are sitting on low rates and traditional financing is unavailable to buyers. Expired listings are a natural fit here: sellers who’ve already been through a full listing cycle without results are highly receptive to any strategy that doesn’t require dropping their price.
Not every listing is a candidate, and seller financing won’t rescue an overpriced home. But for listings where the price is right and the seller has flexibility, run through these questions before your next appointment:
If three or more of those are true, seller financing is worth introducing. The agent’s job is only to make the introduction. A qualified specialist handles the education, paperwork, buyer verification, and seller recommendation call. The program works for stale listings, upcoming listings where you want to differentiate before you even go live, and any situation where a seller is more interested in the right deal than the fastest one.
To learn more about how More Seller Financing works, visit moresellerfinancing.com or search for Ryan Leahy’s program online. The intake process starts with a short call to assess whether your listing is a good fit.