Selling your home without a real-estate agent comes with a lot of grunt work, but could save you thousands. Here's how one owner did it.

• Derrick Chou self-listed his New York City home in order to skirt real-estate agent commissions.
• He said he saved about $40,000, but had to deal with the "grunt work" agents usually handle.
• He said it was rough, but right for him at the time. Five years later, he would hire an agent.

Selling a home comes with a host of hassles, but what if you could save tens of thousands of dollars? The catch: you have to do all the work yourself.

Even before a federal jury found that real-estate agents and brokerages conspired to keep their commissions artificially high, some sellers have opted to cut out the middle men, and list and sell their abode themselves.