Can you avoid paying the listing agent in a sale?

[Mike Flynn]

I've been looking a lot more into creative financing (like seller financing, subject-to, and lease options), but was curious how you'd go about that with a property listed on the MLS through an agent/broker. Let's say a property is listed for a very long time and you wanted to get creative with the seller to buy their property. Do you have to use the realtor that listed the property? Or more specifically, does that agent have a contractual obligation to be paid? Is it possible to have the seller take the property off the market and do the sale transaction between the two of us? I'd love to hear if anyone has had any experience with this! I just recently found the Pace Morby episode (#527) that totally blew my mind with creative financing, but now I have a lot of very specific questions around a lot of the options.

Thanks!!

[Sergey A. Petrov]

99.99% of listing agreements are exclusive (so if the seller were to find their own buyer outside of MLS, their agent still negotiates the deal and gets paid) and extend beyond the property going off MLS (so you can take it off the market today, find a seller next week but your agent still negotiates the deal and gets paid).