Selling a Staten Island House By Owner? Here’s Where Every Document Has to Go

The mortgage was paid off years ago. The kids’ heights are still pencilled onto the door frame in the back hallway. And now that it is just the two of you rattling around a four-bedroom in Great Kills, you have run the numbers on a real estate commission and thought: how hard can it be to sell this ourselves?

Honest answer: not impossibly hard. But if you have been reading up on how to sell a house by owner in New York, almost everything you found was written for the rest of the state, and one piece of it is flat wrong for your borough. It will not stop your sale — it will just waste a week of your life at the wrong counter. You can always sell your house for cash in New York and never touch these forms at all. But if you are doing it yourself, do it knowing where each piece of paper has to land.

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Can you legally sell a Staten Island house without a realtor?

Yes. No New York law requires you to hire a licensed agent to sell property you own, and no law requires you to hire a lawyer either. You are allowed to advertise it, negotiate it and sign it yourself.

Custom is a different matter. New York is an attorney-closing state in practice: the contract of sale is drafted by a lawyer rather than filled in on a form by an agent, and the buyer’s attorney will expect to deal with yours. Going without one is legal and, in a sale this size, usually a false economy. Budget $1,500 to $3,000 a side.

Geography matters here more than it looks. Staten Island is the least populated of New York City’s five boroughs, with 495,747 residents at the 2020 census, and the only one with no subway connection to the rest of the city. It is joined to Brooklyn by the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which in 1964 gave the island its first direct road link to the other boroughs, and to Manhattan by the ferry out of St. George. That separateness is not just a commuting story. It shows up in your paperwork.

How to sell a house by owner in New York: what changes once the house is on Staten Island?

The recording office changes. Every by-owner guide written for New York City tells you the deed goes to the Office of the City Register and gets filed through ACRIS. For your house, that is wrong.

Why will ACRIS not take your Staten Island deed?

Because the City Register does not serve Richmond County. The Department of Finance states it plainly: the Office of the City Register records real property transfer documents “for property in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. (Please contact the Richmond County Clerk for properties in Staten Island.)”

Your deed, and any satisfaction of mortgage, gets recorded with the Richmond County Clerk at 130 Stuyvesant Place in St. George — second floor, a short walk up the hill from the ferry terminal. Staten Island even appears as a selectable borough inside ACRIS, which is exactly why people assume it is covered. The Clerk runs its own land document search online and images of recorded documents are free to view, worth knowing before you pay a third-party site for a copy of your own deed.

Which documents are your job in a by-owner sale, and where does each one go?

Four leave your hands, and they go to four different places — and with no agent in the middle, nobody is chasing you for them. The Property Condition Disclosure Statement goes to the buyer before contract signing. The contract of sale is exchanged attorney to attorney. The deed goes to the Richmond County Clerk. The transfer tax returns — Form NYC-RPT for the city, Form TP-584 for the state — go to the taxing authorities, with the money attached.

Those last ones are real money, not a filing fee. New York State charges the seller $2 per $500 of the price — 0.4%. New York City’s Real Property Transfer Tax on a one- to three-family house, condo or co-op runs 1% at $500,000 or below and 1.425% above it. On a $700,000 Staten Island sale that is $2,800 to the state and $9,975 to the city: just under $13,000, before your attorney bills you.

What is the 30-day clock most by-owner sellers never hear about?

The RPTT return is due within thirty days of the transfer. The Department of Finance’s wording is “You must pay the RPTT tax and file the return within thirty days after the transfer of the property,” and it applies even when the tax owed is zero — the return still has to be filed. Selling by owner does not remove that deadline. It just removes the person who was quietly watching it.

Does the flood disclosure change things on the East Shore?

Considerably, and this is the newest trap. Until March 2024 a New York seller could hand the buyer a $500 credit at closing instead of completing a Property Condition Disclosure Statement, and a great many did. That option was eliminated on 20 March 2024; sellers of one- to four-family homes must now deliver a completed, signed disclosure before contract.

The amended form also added flood questions: whether the property sits in a FEMA-designated 100-year or 500-year floodplain, whether flood insurance is federally required, and the property’s history of flood insurance. For a house in Midland Beach or anywhere along the East Shore, those are the questions a buyer’s attorney reads first — and they are now answered in your handwriting rather than an agent’s. A disclosure you guessed at is a liability you carry after closing.

If you are downsizing, what does selling by owner really cost you?

Mostly time, at the stage of life when you were trying to buy some back. The commission you save is real. So is the fact that you are now the showings coordinator, the disclosure author, the deadline keeper and the person on the phone with a buyer’s attorney about a survey. And most buyers still arrive with an agent, whose fee gets negotiated into your contract — saving the whole commission assumes an unrepresented buyer, and here that is the exception.

And if the house needs work — a kitchen from 1988, a roof you have been nursing along, water in the basement from a storm nobody has forgotten — by-owner selling puts you in the worst position of all: retail buyers with mortgages, inspecting a house that will not appraise cleanly. That is the situation where it makes sense to sell a house as-is on Staten Island rather than fight through two rounds of repair negotiations with a first-time buyer’s lender.

When is selling by owner the wrong move here?

When the calendar, not the price, is the real problem. We will say this plainly even though we buy houses for a living: if your house is in good shape, you are not in a hurry, and you have the patience for the filings above, listing it — by owner or with an agent — will usually net you more than any cash offer, ours included. Take that route.

It goes wrong when there is a hard date attached. A closing on a condo in Florida. A move to be nearer a daughter in Tottenville. A health change that turned stairs into a problem this year, not next. Under a deadline, a listing that sits ninety days and then loses its buyer to a mortgage denial is not a saving — it is the most expensive month of the process.

That is the gap Staten Island cash home buyers exist to fill. We take the property as it stands, we do not ask for repairs, and the deed, the returns and the thirty-day clock become our problem rather than yours. Our cash offer process is three steps and carries no obligation at any point.

The short version

You can sell your Staten Island house yourself. Just know that the deed goes to the Richmond County Clerk on Stuyvesant Place and not to ACRIS, that the transfer tax returns are due within thirty days, and that the disclosure you sign now travels with you after the closing.

If reading that made you tired rather than confident, that is useful information too. Tell us about the house and we will give you a straight number and a date — no obligation, and nobody coming by to stage anything. Fill in the form below, or call us on (347) 685-9317 and talk it through with a person; we are a family-run business, not a call centre. Either way, we buy houses in Staten Island in whatever condition yours is in.

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