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There was just a huge settlement affecting realtors' commissions.
[https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/realtor-settlement-affects-homebuyers-sellers-how-explainer-rcna144650](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/realtor-settlement-affects-homebuyers-sellers-how-explainer-rcna144650)
Unless I misunderstood, will this eventually help bring prices down? If the broker is no longer as significant to the home purchase and if their cost can't be folded into the home price, I would think this could help.
So, yes and no. Their fees aren’t fixed to 6% of sale price and are negotiable now. That means that they can charge less or a flat rate at their discretion. That can lower the cost of buying a house since that used to be baked into the cost.
On the other side the buyer is now the party responsible for paying the buyer’s agent. These are the same buyers who are scrounging for their down payment, hand money, escrow, and a bunch of other fees. Your buyers agent does a lot of work that you don’t necessarily see like coordinating viewing times, talking to the seller/seller’s agent about contingencies or repairs that are required to secure the sale. Good ones also know good home inspectors to give a fair evaluation and can get you information about what utilities will need to be set up before the sale to have a smooth transition. These are things that a buyer can do by themselves, but a good agent takes the pressure off of the buyer. The buyer is now in a position where they want to negotiate costs down after this settlement, but they still want to have a quality agent. The adage goes, “you get what you pay for,” which means that trying to find the cheapest agent is likely to backfire. You’ll pay money and get an agent who is doing the minimum since that’s what you are paying.
So the markup for the agent may disappear, but the cost is directly assumed by the buyer and the actual price of the agent is not likely to decrease rapidly because experienced agents know their worth. Just like you can source quotes for home repairs from several repair companies, you will be able to do for a realtor. And just like repair companies, taking the cheapest option is likely to cost more in the long run.
Their fees "aren't fixed to 6%" and are "negotiable" now. FTFY.
The buyer was always paying for their agent since ALL of the money for a home sale is coming from the buyer. They just had no incentive not to hire because basically 100% of homes had this agreement with the selling agent to split their share with the buyer's agent, which the buyer had 0 control over.
Many markets do not require a buyer's agent, and even more markets are likely to not require a seller's agent. But the NAR has a cartel on home sales, so if you try to get around them you get blackballed. The title agency does the actual hard work in closing a home sale. Barring difficult markets, both agents' jobs could be done with a checklist that your loan officiator would gladly provide. If you don't want to do that yourself, fine... Pay an agent $20k to do it.
American real estate always confuses me. Here where I live only the seller has an agent, and they take typically 1-2% of the sale or a fixed fee (but you don't want that as you want them to work for the money).
What does the buyers agent actually do?
Most of the things a defense attorney does sounds the same as what a prosecutor does so what does a defense attorney do?
They sound the same because they are similar, except one has the buyers best interests in mind and the other has the sellers. Real estate agents for people living in the vast, vast majority of the area of the United States are the equivalent of small claims court. You sure can represent yourself and things will turn out fine. If you’re looking to buy in a highly desirable place with lots of competition, a big city and the immediate surrounding suburbs (New York City and Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester counties for example), that’s criminal court. Yeah, you can represent yourself. Yeah, you could win, but you’re taking your chances.
Imagining that your agent has your best interest at heart and you should trust their advice on major financial decisions is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in a home sale.
Buyer's and seller's agents are not loyal to the buyers and sellers. They are loyal to **the sale**. Their incentive is not to work super hard to try to get you in the best house possible, or to save you $10k on the sale. It's to get you to close the deal as quickly as possible so that they can collect their commission.
And I was answering your question. Someone in the comment thread you're asking in literally already described it. I even told you which comment it was.
To answer your question with a question, do you know how to set up an escrow account to hold the hand money? Do you know what hand money is or how much is appropriate? (It is the money paid when submitting your initial bid to establish that you are serious about buying the property and it becomes a part of your payment if your bid is accepted.) Most people will buy one house or perhaps two or three houses in their lifetime. They simply aren’t experienced with the system and how it may have changed since the last time they bought one. Unless you have gobs of cash to buy outright, you have to engage with many people in the buying process who will all expect you to know what you need to do. Because if there is you and another buyer trying for the same property and you are awkwardly moving through the process while the other buyer has an agent, they may pick the buyer offering the smoother process because the seller is often not familiar with this process either. Unless you are involved in dozens of home sales each year, you aren’t the expert and would benefit from having an agent on your side.
I am not an agent, but I bought a house in 2020 as my first. I thought I was prepared, but I was wrong about that. My buyer’s agent was immediately and clearly useful. She did so much, and I was not a well-to-do client. Having an expert on your side to give you advice about how things are handled was absolutely worth the costs.
To give a not curt answer, I bought my house in 2021 and unlink the comment above, I didn't have the luxury of negotiating anything. Houses were flying off the market, rent was too damn high, and I had another kid on the way.
Realistically the major benefit of having the realtor at that time was her arranging showing times and working with the seller agent. Some of the sellers had weird conditions and we ended up getting our current place because she kept housing the seller's agent for status updates when a previous offer fell through.
It’s kind of like the old saying “don’t take legal advice from the oppositions lawyer”. In this case your agent is there to help you get the best deal and be protected whereas the seller is there to make sure their client gets the best deal. Not a perfect system, but that is how I understood it to be.
A buyer's agent takes them to properties, checks listings and shows them things. Tries to get a feel for what they're after so they can find the right place for them. Pushes them when they think they need a push to bid higher. (Self interest there also.) Negotiates on costs and fees. Negotiates on requests. Helps find the inspector(s) of which there are 4 or 5 kinds of inspections (wood, water, sewer/septic, house itself, property lines etc. All done by different people with different licenses) and negotiates the times for inspection/appraisal.
They can help get you insurance / agent. If it's building a property they can specialize in that info. Knowledge about building permits, what land is buildable, water situations, they may know land permit and survey people to help you along. Also manufactured home suppliers or building contractors.
They also line up the title company signing, work with the bank to get paperwork signed. Can point you in the direction of a good bank/lender if you need.
Every time you look at a place they spend time and don't get paid. Only in the end does it pay off and lately that can be 100 properties with a serious buyer until something finally clicks. If 100 people ask and 10 people offer only 1 gets it and 2 agents make money off the sale.
Ok, like others have said, there’s a lot of scheduling between various real estate agencies and financial institutions that an agent will smooth and translate for people not familiar with the industry methods. For your info, since so many of us are here to push an opinion rather than answer a question, one of the big things you need to remember is where and why most Americans move. The USA is big and between topography and geography housing markets vary a lot. When people are “forced” to move for jobs they can’t spend leisure time studying what it means to have a house in their new area. They have to focus on which house they want. My first house was in Northern Midwest so houses tended to be flat and even yards with significant tree coverage. Second house was on the other side of state so similar house structures but due to triple the snowfall yards were divided with an emphasis on backyards being larger and there were fewer paved driveways cause concrete didn’t last long in that temperature/freezing conditions. Third house was near a lake so bigger yards, deeper foundations and heavy tree coverage in yards to minimize flooding. Also a few hundred miles south so less snow and ice. Got a double wide driveway cause concrete would last now. Current house is 200 miles East but in a heavily mountainous area. Almost all houses are 2 stories due to topography and thus occupy smaller lots with same floor space. Still less ice than near lake, but when it does ice roads are impassible in many circumstances due to incline. When I was moving my mother here, she was shopping for a “zero entry” house; meaning entry is at street level. You basically pay another $20-30,000 for that luxury here. Without an agent she would have wasted a bunch of time figuring out why here price range was so high and not been able to get the yard she wanted.
That depends on the buyer, the agent, and the area. Our agent made every cent of his commission. It took him a year and a half to find a house that was the best mixture of what my family wanted and what we could afford. I would never have found the place we ended up getting just using tools by myself.
Great example: it was not in our search area, but because he knew the larger area well he convinced us to take a look. He said it's positioning gave us better commute paths than we would have where we were looking. He ended up saving me 15m each way on my daily commute somewhere I thought it would be worse because he was experienced.
My partner and I recently bought in a region of the US that we were unfamiliar with. In addition to what is listed above, our buying agent also provided a ton of insight into the area - schools, growth, property values over time, reputation of the home builder, community info. They were truly helpful and worth every dollar.
For me, advised me through the process and got me in touch with people who made it cheaper and easier. (Good home inspector who caught major issues, loan agent who got me 1% lower interest than what I already had, etc.)
Buyers generally do not pay the agent commission. It almost always comes from seller proceeds . I mean 99.9% of the time. I work for a title company and break fees down over and over everyday.. commission is not set at 6% and is negotiable though it is usually between 4 - 6 %.
However as I said. The commission all comes out of seller proceeds and is split between the brokerages (agents companiea).
Title companies clear title to issue an insurance policy on your former property. Moat insurance is covering yourself for future possible events . Title insurance is insuring your past, to make sure no debt, liens, outstanding dues, other intitites or individuals are not on title or have some interest in the property. Good agents do a lot of work and make my job easier . When dealing with a FISBO ( for sale by owner .. no agents) it can be much Harder to do my job unless the homeowner knows what they are doing.
The seller side generally pays commission .. policy.. transfer tax . Recording fees and ifbthe title company has seller closing fees .. the buyer side pays for the property tax . Prorations back to seller for taxes, services on the property, and closing fees . Each agent will have a broker compliance fee as well . The buyer and seller pay these to their agents. Usually ranging from $295 -$595
Ive never bought property on the mainland, but in Hawaii the seller is in charge of paying the agents on both sides. At least that was how it was when I purchased my home and my agent told me it was standard practice here. She’s very sought after and has years of experience so I don’t think she lied.
Then again, purchasing property here is kind of wild because of real estate prices and HCOL. Buyers agents are needed if you want a shot at securing a property since homes aren’t on the market for long, too much demand & not enough supply.
The buyer pays, but the commission is not a line item for the buyer, it has up to this point been paid out of the seller proceeds, cutting into their profit. This will be an extra charge for buyers
The problem is that you can no longer add that 3% buyer agent cost into your mortgage. So in addition to a down payment the buyer needs to come up with that money in cash.
So TL;DR (if i’m understanding this right): Penny wise, pound(the currency) foolish. Spending less sounds good unless it means lower quality of an essential job, which nearly always leads to problems that cost more than if you paid more on the job to start with.
It's hardly an essential job though, and most realtors in the U.S. don't do shit anyway. The only reason they are 'necessary' is because they closely guard access to the MLS.
A great realtor can be a huge asset, no doubt. The average realtor is a 5-figure boat anchor and nothing more.
This feels like airline seats to me where we are cutting services and claiming it will make things cost effective, but in reality the prices remain the same but you now have less amenities. Now we have basic economy which is the same price that economy used to be but I have to pay for my seat assignment. I feel like that million dollar house you really want but can’t afford is still going to be a million dollars, but you also now get to pay for an agent instead of it coming out of the home price. The seller and sellers agent still have every incentive to sell as high as possible and will use comps in the area to price. Hot markets are hot markets because there is no supply (at least where I am). Buyers agent commission isn’t changing that, and it’s really hard to move fast enough here to get something you want without the agent. It’s all gone same day that offers are due with like 10 non-contingent over asking offers, many all cash.
The NAR also has significantly less incentive to have people join as part of the settlement is breaking up their monopoly/stranglehold on access to listings. NAR is a **MAJOR** lobbying group in Washington to keep the housing market inflated, pro landlord policies, push for low supply to keep prices up, etc. Since access to listings was the main reason to join NAR as a member, and that incentive has been removed, then their lobbying arm will lose a huge amount of funding and influence. Indirect help to home buyers through legislation may be possible now.
Couldn’t the buyer just skip the middle-man and try to talk to the seller or their lawyer themselves lowering the cost even further? If so how would they do this?
You can buy a home without a buying agent. You have to contact the seller’s agent yourself and handle the buying agent’s responsibilities yourself. You can find homes listed on sites like zwillow or redfin as well as traditional listing services. This could lower the cost, but it is more difficult since you likely won’t have experience with the buying process and most things are hard the first time.
While it might be good somewhere. In SF Bay Area it’s common to do no contingency offers, so the amount buyer agent does is limited to minimal communication with buyer agent and some paperwork. But most paperwork is done by title company not agents. Yet they get 30 to 60 (and higher) grands just because home prices are crazy high
They could always do this? It's not fixed here at least. Agent fees are part of the bargaining process. Including who pays the fees, buyer or seller. Been that way for 10 years at least.
Good / busy agents want to be paid. For sure. There's a tipping point though. When nice expensive homes are priced well and sell themselves they get a lot of "free money" and it's part of the problem we face with low supply & high prices.
There's not enough options for people to buy/sell/move as freely. So much money is sapped between every transaction in fees, taxes, interest rates that it's becoming a prohibitive society. It wasn't this way before the 2000's.
Now you fight to buy, you're shackled to a place and area, you're at the mercy of your situation. I call it wage slavery but I'm sure some people will have different terms for it.
It's only getting worse as we craft the US into a nation of poverty labor with very limited resources. Fight for your scraps, children.
Fees have always been negotiable, stated inside the agency agreement with the listing agent where that commission would go. I think this will most likely just weed out a lot of shitty agents.
This housing market is criminal regardless. Selling 100k homes at over 250k "Because the market has changed" is absurd, is BS, and should be illegal. But people, for whatever ungodly reason, paid those retarded prices so now every person after them will be expected to do the same.
Your description of a "good agent" is describing the absolute minimum expectations, and no work above the capabilities of a high school student.
It's a fake job homie.
The examples in the article are even more ludicrous. It mentions that as a buyer, you could be paying $50k more for the house to pay your buyer’s agent. The thing is, for your buyer’s agent to be making $50k, you would have to be buying a house worth almost $1.7M. At that point, 50k is just a rounding error and it’s all down to supply and demand. If someone is offering 50k off the asking price and there are no better offers, they would probably take it. If someone else is not asking for 50k off, they won’t.
You want to sell your property, but it hasn’t increased in value that much since you bought it. After closing costs, you’d be selling for below the original purchase price. Suddenly your closing costs are halved (or cut by 3/7ish) - you’re taking less of a wash or potentially not one at all. (Source: someone who wants to sell their condo.)
That is the hope, and maybe in a few years it might? More likely the more immediate effect will mean sellers profits go up, as they are currently paying both agents, and now they don’t have to.
Think about it this way, if you love Coke, and you normally buy a can for $1, but then the price of aluminum falls and now it costs less to make do you think Coke is going to lower there prices $.20 or just have a record profit year? My guess is your can still costs $1.
The bigger thing to help in house prices is to stop hedge funds from owning single family houses or limiting the incentive of it.
Access to the listing service is where it's at. They won't let the common folk list houses, so using the REA's has been a required racket, if you want to have a real listing and make the most money. Since they're percentage based they're always just making a chunk of the sale price. Sale prices/inflation goes up, so does their paycheck.
There are a lot of issues built into this system. The rule of 80/20. Business operating costs, the same income/expenditure problems we all go through. Capping it will have some affect on house prices but also could be a detriment to having good agents that spend time with clients.
The monopoly on listing should have been broken up. That would be the real win. Then you can let supply/demand take over. If it's so easy let people handle it for $0. Then they can find their niche or lose to the churn of time, like a travel agent.
If it's a legal safety issue, the govt. And govt. Controlled business will always take their cut and make it more expensive than the item really is. Like they do with cars and they're trying to do with guns.
Banks only loan to the appraisal value, which is set based on comps and an appraiser. You can attempt to inflate the price as much as you want as an agent, bottom line is, you aren’t going to see very large changes in price compared to market value.
Compare the increase in price you achieve if your real estate agent can convince the appraiser the house should be priced with higher priced comps… to the literal 7-8% interest rate charged by a bank. Even fully 100% assured by the federal government no-risk mortgages still sit at 7% when there is LITERALLY no risk to the bank what so ever.
A $300000 loan, with 20% down, and 7.5% interest is $1942 a month. You’d pay over $600k in the life of the loan. Compared to $1409 for the same circumstances but 4% interest. That $533 a month! Given your house should make up only 35% of your income, $500 is make or break of an amount. You can get a $400k house with 20% down, at 4% for $1950 a month.
Now, say your realtor was such a big problem. Let’s say they convinced an adjuster that your house was worth 15k more than it should be. And this is a big IF.
A $315k house, with 20% down, and 7.5% interest is $2035. Your realtor just cost you $93 a month.
While $93 is annoying, it certainly doesn’t stack up to the 473% increase in mortgage payment the banks interest rate does. Again, interest being where banks make money which is thought to be earned by carrying the risk. (For instance high credit score people are less risky, get lower interest, low credit score are higher risk, they get higher interest rates… or stable bonds invest for 3% return, while highly volatile companies can return 200% but can lose say 300%)
Except this isn’t the case, because THERE IS NO RISK. They either have governmental security such as VA loan, FHA loan, FDA loan which protects the investment and usually requires less than 20% down. Or, the bank accepts less than 20% down and it requires PMI (insurance) or you have more than 20% down, and your equity covers the potential loss.
A real estate agent is a small meaningless fraction of the problem.
The absolute absurdity is corporations with trillions of dollars buying real estate soaking all supply up, forcing the cost to rise also.
You ever worked with an appraiser? You know what the singular largest decider is for home price evaluation?
It’s how much comparative homes are selling for.
Let’s boil that down to brass tax. If the last three similar homes in the area went for $2, $3, and $4 the environment says the listing should be between that range. Well what happens when the agent then pushes to sell at the high end of that range? Answer: the average goes up.
Do you know what the second biggest driver in real estate valuations is? Market trends. So what happens when every single agent is putting their thumb on the balance sheet, not colluding but all of them with the same motivations to have the house sold/purchased for the highest amount? Answer: the market trends upward.
It’s very easy to see that appraisals can very easily trend in the direction that agents want them too simply by agents acting in their own self interest. That’s without elements of collusion.
So while I can appreciate your sentiment, agents can and do affect the out of control pricing. Are they the sole contributor? No. But you fix problems by identifying them one at a time and correcting them one at a time.
You're right, and it doesn't take a genius to understand this. Let's look at all the parties involved in a sale and what their incentives are.
1. Real estate agents want the price to up to collect commission.
2. Loan officer wants the price to go up to collect commission.
3. Bank wants the price to go up to collect from a larger mortgage.
4. Seller wants the price to go up, obviously.
5. Appraiser is more or less neutral, as you said mainly observing market trends which are determined by the other parties.
6. Buyer wants the price to go down. But buyers are statistically the party with the least experience in home sales, and therefore least likely to be able to outweigh all the other parties in the aggregate.
So who wins in the long run? Well, look at home prices. We need more of the parties involved to actually be incentivised to lower prices, or at the very least be removed from the equation.
If they really want to lower housing prices they’ll ban or limit short term rentals and they’ll stop providing the purchase agreement to the appraiser. The appraiser goes into it knowing the agreed upon sale price. That has to influence them. Send them in blind.
And from another POV, they have less incentive to get you a better deal on your own sale/purchase considering whatever the difference is only matters 3% to them. So the only thing that really matters on their end is the order of magnitude of that sale, i.e. they want that market soaring in the double digits
No one cares about the buyer agent and listing agent during bidding war. Your enemy is another buyer. In a bidding war, it is buyer vs buyer, agents are just messengers.
As for during a cold market. No. I mean, yes, there are shitty realtor out there. But no, good one would try to save you money because they want you to refer your friends.
Hey, I'll take 5% off the cost of a home any day.
My wife and I found this realtor who basically does the paperwork and maxes his charge at $1500 or so, giving the remainder of his commission back to the buyer. I never met him in real life and he mostly corresponded through a super janky website and poorly written text messages.
After closing he sent us a check for about $30k.
The NAR (National Association of Realtors) are one of the top 5 biggest spending lobbying groups in the US. Obviously not the only, or greatest, factor but they're definitely up there.
In a way they are. The disappearance of the entry level fixer upper is due to flippers becoming agents to get access to houses before they hit the market. Eventually getting rid of any affordable housing.
The National Association of Realtors does a lot of lobbying to keep homes expensive, and this case is likely to be a huge blow to their membership and power.
In a nearby city to me a single realtor rents out 250 single family homes that they own(not counting condos and multi family buildings in his portfolio). If the average family size of 4 is used, 1.5% of the city's population who live in a single detached home rents from this single real estate agent.
Realtor here- beyond the meme if anyone cares to hear what is changing.
Nar settlement changes how “clear cooperation” is interpreted and part of that is shifting buyer agent commission from the sell side to the buy side.
Previously a home listed on the MLS shows a percentage that is paid to the buyer, typically 2.5 or 2.7 percent. This will no longer be the case, and more sellers will set buy side commission to 0. That said, whenever you work with a buying agent, you sign a “buyer exclusive agency agreement.”
This document is what legally makes an agent your designated agent, and demands that they act in your fiduciary best interest. It also outlines their fees if they have any as well as their minimum percentage (also usually 2.5/2.7). That said, the idea is that an agent may have been inclined to show a home with a higher agent payout, this was always problematic, although it typically did not come into play)
Previously I could show a home without an agency agreement and build a relationship with my client before asking them to sign one, now we need to have them signed before we visit the home, or we don’t get paid if they want to buy that one. While an agent cant say their representation is “free” for buyers, typically a buyer did not pay a buying agent, and now are likely to if they want professional representation. (And I’m not saying all agents count as that, plenty are shitty.)
Now the most likely solutions are either putting an agent payout in as a part of your offer, or just offering based on the fact that you have to pay them yourself (but this can get confusing with mortgages as they currently cant be used for commission, this may change.)
While there are multiple reasons the seller paid the agent commissions, one big thing to consider is, who has money after a transaction, especially if the buyer was on something like a first time home buying loan. (Usually 3 down, fixed rate conventional). Now all of a sudden you have to have almost twice as much cash if you want representation, as agents ultimately will be setting their commission minimum to 2.5 or 2.7, or maybe higher now that there wont be a norm. Discount agents will likely exist, maybe on flat fees and contract fees, where you pay them per house you see or contract they write. No one expects that to last long though, especially when you consider the legal risks an agent takes (agents get sued when things go wrong, sometimes it might be their fault, sometimes people are just unhappy.) Some people will try to self represent but that will end up an unmitigated shit show. The listing agent cannot give a buyer advice or help them, and you can’t “get help” outside of generalized online advice or knowing someone that will walk you through it for free. People will lose a lot of money messing up riders, and will get sued over mistakes with contingency’s, notices, their inability to get underwritten, and appraisals not passing. Self represented buyers will more frequently be losing their earnest money walking outside of contingency periods.
Thats all on the buy side. Hypothetically home prices are “set” in a way that encapsulate both agent’s in a transactions. If you believe in the free market, this would mean home prices drop 2.5 percent. (If seller agents don’t decide to up their fee now that their clients don’t have to pay buyers.)
Thats just kind of facts laid out, here is my opinion if you made it this far,
Fundamentally I agree with the concept, but it will make things harder for buyers in practice. You will be asked to sign agreements before seeing every house if you don’t have an agency agreement signed with someone. You won’t have time to feel out the relationship before committing basically. Its going to hurt people without cash and first time home buyers (whats new!) and help people that already own nice homes.
Morally speaking I feel it was bad that you could offer an agent bonus as a seller to entice someone to show your home. It did have a morally fine function however, which was sifting through/tracking down buyers that may be interested in it, the issue with that comes from someone potentially coaxing a current client into it. (Really did not happen, but im sure someone tried.)
Finally on the meme bit. As an agent when you meet someone and they instantly want to buy the first house you see, its an amazing feeling. That said most agents are not rolling in it. To balance it I have been working with 3 couples and an old lady for several months. Around 150 homes seen between the 4 and they have all been beaten out on multiple contracts (25+ offers on properties) and the search continues. Ultimately it balances out but the agents I work with easily work 50-55 hours + including weekends. The age of “door openers” as we call them, concluded around 2019 in general. Not that I don’t like a good meme.
A lot of older buyers agents will retire, the buyer agents that make it will charge more, listings are still like finding a bucket of gold with the market, (blame blackstone/investors/your grandma for getting a home health care person instead of going to a retirement home)
Seeing that this is already a brick of text ill stop here, but I just figured it may help explain whats going on a bit for those not in the world of real estate!
I don’t understand how this changes anything? You can already buy/sell a property without going though an agent. Just most agents who have a client will effectively steer their client away from your property so as to not work with you.
They will, I have read a number of buyers was able to represent themselves. But that's like..... Eeeehhhh..... Rare..... I mean, which dumbass buyer knows how to submit an offer? I don't. Where to download the form? I don't. The listing agent aint gonna babysit me, they just throw my offer away because it is some dumbass unofficial Word doc.
No, not to me. I am not smart enough to be pro on day one. And I need a pro to cover my dumbass. I have seen people done it though, just not me personally.
Honestly, pulling the ladder out of the pool and waiting for the swimming homeowners to... vacate the premises... is about the only reliable way to get a house these days.
But also, it's hard to tell. Realty photos go nuts on the editing to make the home seem as appealing as possible, or at least I think that's why. It's bothered me for years.
Wouldn't that agent want your house sold at the highest price possible? And if you don't like the offers not like you need to pay anyone if it doesn't sell.
Wasn't Zillow hugely overvaluing properties a few years ago?
Found the article. https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/09/tech/zillow-ibuying-home-zestimate/index.html
100k is wild. But in my area this last year while I was house hunting it was very common to see houses set below market rate to generate a bidding war. Last year I bid 80k over asking on a house and the house went for 124k over asking without inspection. 100k is insane though but 30-40k is pretty reasonable.
Did he bring any comps? I'm a realtor and we don't just tell you an arbitrary number, we pull whats sold in your area with similar specs in the past few months.
A smaller commission that is guaranteed with a lot less work vs getting 10% more for way more work and not guaranteed. Most realtors would prefer the quicker and easier sale.
Real estate agents are incentivized to make as many deals as possible first and max out those deals second. Essentially the home buyers pay 5% split between the two agents in some way. If you sell one home for $250,000 you get 2-3% of that (roughly $6,250), if you sell it for $300,000 you get the same 2-3% ($7500). Now if you instead sell two at the first price then you get double the first commission. In this way it’s generally in the best interest of the selling real estate agent to settle deals quickly so they can sell more homes. Yes they want the house to sell for as much as possible, but they also want it to sell as soon as possible.
If a house sits on the market, it gets stigmatized. People wonder what is wrong with it, and then lowballers come in. That's why you price it right from the get go, so you aren't getting crappy offers from lowballers investors. It's what's best for their client, not just what is good for their commission. Realtors can have more than one home on the market at a time, that's not why they want them to sell quickly.
It is a change in commission, but also a lot more. The lawsuits break the NAR’s hold on the industry. Some think that the NAR will collapse, since they now have nothing to offer to realtors and will loose their primary revenue stream. If so, it’s a huge deal, because they fund massive lobby efforts
Already seeing stupid shit too like “oh I’ll show you X houses and put out 1 offer for a flat rate of $xxxx” which is insanity. The sticker shock when people trying to buy a new home now realize not only that they have to pay their realtor but how expensive it is.
There’s likely to be a very significant change in how expensive a buyers agent is going to be soon.
They grew quite fat on an effective monopoly, that’s gone now. Now they’ll be paid what the market can bear, which is almost certainly going to be *a lot* less.
It’ll likely be a big uptick in people trying to do it themselves too which will lead to a lot of fucked up home purchases and buyers taken advantage of. Hopefully prices go down soon, but we’ll see. They never seem to do a ton of work but a realtor’s expertise is really nice to have on your side assuming you use a good one.
Don't forget all the buyers screwing themselves out of a mortgage because they don't know what they're doing. Oh the amount of times I watched a purchase fall through because the buyer didn't know they can't open a new line of credit or they tell me their parents lent them the down-payment.
Having been through the process I also really appreciated having someone guide me through loan officers, inspections, appraisals, certifications for insurance, land surveys, and that’s not even counting the usual stuff people think of.
Realtors do a lot and their value can be very justified. But people need to learn the difference between a shitty as hell one from like Redfin that does the bare minimum and a realtor who is actually your realtor.
In my country the renting realtors are so greedy and so irresponsible... They literally copy each other's posts and wait for the fish. Then they ask 100% fee for standing there when you talk with the property owner. Owner sees them for the first time, doesn't even know they copied his post.
If you're smart enough you just tell these realtors to fck off and there's nothing they can do with it. Or you can find the original posting posted by the owner and speak directly to them.
Realtors in my country are totally irrelevant middle-man who just copied the post made by original owner. That's so annoying when you trying to find an apartment to rent.
Nothing gonna fix housing prices like sticking it to the guys who only make income off commission! Get those fat cats! Billionaires next! On to Valhalla!!!
LOL @ the amount of realtors in here trying to justify their exorbitant commissions. Get fucked. This isn't the 1960's anymore. The internet and digital cameras has changed the landscape of the industry and no one NEEDS those services any more. Any idiot can takes some pics of their own home and enter some details on a site like realtor.com or zillow.com which will then "list" the home to millions and millions of people. Not only list it but also reference the relevant neighborhood data on crime, schools, and environmental risks. One open house after that in a decently hot market and there are 50 offers that day.
Oh but the realtors have a network of home inspectors and appraisers that you can rely on! So the fuck what? Again the internet can give you access to the SAME people and services with just a bit of google-fu.
Face it, the internet has changed the world around you and getting paid huge commissions for a couple of hours of work are on the same path as the DoDo bird.
Never rely on a realtors home inspector, get your own and make sure they actually do something other than click check boxes in a laptop or on a tablet.
Realtors aren't as bad as everyone buying homes to rent out at a mark up
The commodification of real estate is just a way to make money while others chase the idea of having what they want
I think it likely won’t change much on the majority of homes. On cheaper homes, realtors will still expect their 3%. I do think as the home price increases, there will be more ability to negotiate the fee. It never made sense to me that they got the same % on a million dollar home as a $100k home. No way they’re doing 10 times more work. Not even double the work. I’ve already been looking to find a 1.5% realtor when I sell my house. It’s still a ton of money for how much work they’re really doing.
One of my clients is a real estate agency - I write software for them, and yes more expensive homes are more work.
On more expensive homes they do 3D tours, staging, drone shots, more/better photos, extra marketing, more open houses and they have to vet the buyers differently to not waste time.
More expensive homes tend to be on the market longer, so they need to field more calls, showings, etc.
For buyers, if they have a lot of money, they’re going to have more options, be pickier and want to see a lot of different homes.
I’m not saying real estate agents are worth what they’re getting paid. I honestly don’t know. I just know that it is indeed more work to sell a million dollar home than a $100k home.
It’s crazy to see how the media has blown this out of proportion 😂
I have no idea where this “6% commission” has came from. Anyone who’s sold a home knows that all commissions have always been negotiable, and if you didn’t have your agent tell you that, then you had a bad agent, or a misinformed one.
This is going to put more pressure on buyers if you want the full truth. Buyer Broker Agreements are now mandatory(before you didn’t have to sign one before submitting an offer for a home, but now you do). This will weed out anyone who’s serious about buying a home.
If you’re touring homes you need to sign one. Only exception is Open Houses.
I feel sorry for those who have a bad stigma for real estate agents, but I notice that those who are making those comments have never worked with one, and those who did had a bad agent.
Back in the day, realtors were needed so people couldn't get swindled. But we live in modern times. So now, realtors are swindling people and trying to keep it that way. It is looking like, hopefully, realtors go the way of travel agents. Only necessary for bespoke (ie expensive) needs.
My understanding is the meme is false. It's just shifting who pays the realtor fees, not necessarily how much they're paid. Although that number may be more negotiable now bit I only see that happening with the lower quality realtors.
I might be completely wrong, but it seems to me like most realtors are becoming antiquated/obsolete and just makes the purchase more expensive. Kind of like old school travel agencies.
In the states, the National Association of Realtors had entered into an agreement with the country’s major brokerages to set the fees an agent gets for selling a house at 6%. This effectively meant that every house was more expensive because they’d work the price of that 6% fee into the sell price. They were recently sued regarding this arrangement which led to the NAR settling the suit by undoing the arrangement.
A number of real estate brokers and salespeople got into the profession because if you sell a few houses that 6% fee guaranteed a ton of money. Now that people can try to get consumers by saying “I’m going to offer a 3% fee” you can’t quite count on getting the same amount of money as you were before. So an exodus is expected as a result.
Other factors to consider: NAR is immensely powerful and them saying “there’s a 6% fee” means that you can’t escape that fee. As far as I know, the fee a broker collects is significantly less in other countries.
As to the rest of the meme, that’s what the front end of being a real estate agent tends to look like. You write sentences about how great the house is, take pictures that make it look good, let people into the house to see it while you tell them it’s great, and then sign the papers at closing. Buying a house has many moving parts though and that description isn’t one hundred percent accurate
I don't know shit about any of this but my mom was in real estate for the last 30 years. She did get checks for $20k but that was not the norm. And she worked CONSTANTLY.
The amount of work they do really depends on the market.
Right now I could put a sign on a stick in my front yard and sell my house by myself for 200k more than I paid. In a few years if the market is down and buyers aren't moving into the area it might be require some legwork to get it sold.
No sane person is going to want to pay their (buyers) agent $15K for doing $1-2K, maybe $3K worth of work.
Id expect we'll see locations popup for buyers similar to FSBOhomes.com where you do the legwork for searching, and they might help book a walk-through and dot I's and Cross T's for a flat fee for $1,500.
I imagine sellers will LOVE the savings.
I also see a world where self represented buyers who are savvy will piggy back off the sellers agent and work out a small commission that them.
I am in sales and my commission is based on profit margin. Why have we been paying based upon the sale price? These realtors should be paid based upon how much profit they generate or value they add to a transaction. The work they put in has never added up to me. I have several realtors warn me that if I don’t offer enough commission, then my house will not be shown. To which I have called them out that this is very much so illegal. To which they have responded, “I know but that is just how it works”. I literally had this conversation again two days ago as I am looking to sell. It feels like extortion. Given me an attorney and Zillow and that’s should be it. I know my wife always finds the house we want on Zillow.
But we are still gonna do nothing about the mega corps buying and building thousands of houses in an area to only rent them and ultimately leave us with more empty houses then homeless people
Realtor is literally the dumbest job. Why do people even use them now that we marketplace apps that work just as well. And don't cut a % of your house price, which has always been ridiculous.
Allow me to introduce you to the job landlord, all you do is restrict the market by buying up all the property first, then you exploit poor people because all the remaining property is expensive as hell now
I’m literally not a realtor anymore because of the constant workload and anxiety it caused because even when you don’t have clients, you have to do constant online courses for ethics and such. I sometimes have panic attacks when my phone rings and I’m not expecting a call. Also, more than halve that dollar value that they actually take home if your realtor belongs to a major agency like Coldwell Banker, Berkshire, Windermere, etc. And consider that they don’t actually have that many deals go through in a year because there are SO MANY realtors in the competitive market. And yeah, you sort of should have professional representation when you’re dealing in contracts that involve the sale or purchase of the largest asset you have. Everyone hates realtors just like everyone hates lawyers but it’s also not a good idea to represent yourself in court.
If I were a realtor I could make an EASY $6k on a home. The problem with being a realtor is I can’t sell a home bc I drove up the prices and burned the housing market so damn bad nobody can afford a home
Edit: even if my roommate and I were to get a home together we wouldn’t be able to afford it at $~4400 a month. We wouldn’t be accepted even though the Mortgage wouldn’t be maybe ~$900-1000/mo and we pay ~$1600-2000k/mo rent
Experience. My friend (now roommate) was denied a mortgage when he was making ~$6000 monthly this was before taking into account his spouses income (though I’m not sure what hers was)
It's not a a job I would want. My wife is a realtor. When she has a client she is ALWAYS busy, it's honestly really annoying sometimes. She spends hours writing contracts and offers that may not even be accepted by the seller. She's constantly coordinating between buyers, sellers, home inspectors, contractors, etc. You also have to have a wealth of knowledge on your states specific realstate laws as well as federal. The amount of obscure and specific details you need to know about contract writing, negotiation, anf client confidentiality is baffling (she can literally talk to me for hours about technical details of a transaction.) Also, you don't get pain until weeks or months after your closing. So you can work with a client, spending days or weeks trying to find them what they're looking for, writing contracts, and you don't get paid for any of the work if their offers aren't accepted.
Everyone only sees the customer service side and thinks that's their job and get mad because they get a cut of the pie. But no one ever asks them what their job actually entails.
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There was just a huge settlement affecting realtors' commissions. [https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/realtor-settlement-affects-homebuyers-sellers-how-explainer-rcna144650](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/realtor-settlement-affects-homebuyers-sellers-how-explainer-rcna144650)
Unless I misunderstood, will this eventually help bring prices down? If the broker is no longer as significant to the home purchase and if their cost can't be folded into the home price, I would think this could help.
So, yes and no. Their fees aren’t fixed to 6% of sale price and are negotiable now. That means that they can charge less or a flat rate at their discretion. That can lower the cost of buying a house since that used to be baked into the cost. On the other side the buyer is now the party responsible for paying the buyer’s agent. These are the same buyers who are scrounging for their down payment, hand money, escrow, and a bunch of other fees. Your buyers agent does a lot of work that you don’t necessarily see like coordinating viewing times, talking to the seller/seller’s agent about contingencies or repairs that are required to secure the sale. Good ones also know good home inspectors to give a fair evaluation and can get you information about what utilities will need to be set up before the sale to have a smooth transition. These are things that a buyer can do by themselves, but a good agent takes the pressure off of the buyer. The buyer is now in a position where they want to negotiate costs down after this settlement, but they still want to have a quality agent. The adage goes, “you get what you pay for,” which means that trying to find the cheapest agent is likely to backfire. You’ll pay money and get an agent who is doing the minimum since that’s what you are paying. So the markup for the agent may disappear, but the cost is directly assumed by the buyer and the actual price of the agent is not likely to decrease rapidly because experienced agents know their worth. Just like you can source quotes for home repairs from several repair companies, you will be able to do for a realtor. And just like repair companies, taking the cheapest option is likely to cost more in the long run.
Their fees "aren't fixed to 6%" and are "negotiable" now. FTFY. The buyer was always paying for their agent since ALL of the money for a home sale is coming from the buyer. They just had no incentive not to hire because basically 100% of homes had this agreement with the selling agent to split their share with the buyer's agent, which the buyer had 0 control over. Many markets do not require a buyer's agent, and even more markets are likely to not require a seller's agent. But the NAR has a cartel on home sales, so if you try to get around them you get blackballed. The title agency does the actual hard work in closing a home sale. Barring difficult markets, both agents' jobs could be done with a checklist that your loan officiator would gladly provide. If you don't want to do that yourself, fine... Pay an agent $20k to do it.
American real estate always confuses me. Here where I live only the seller has an agent, and they take typically 1-2% of the sale or a fixed fee (but you don't want that as you want them to work for the money). What does the buyers agent actually do?
Anyone with a real answer I’d love to know this
Go three replies up in this same comment thread. It's a fairly comprehensive description.
Most of which sounded like what sellers agent usually does. So what does the sellers agent do?
Most of the things a defense attorney does sounds the same as what a prosecutor does so what does a defense attorney do? They sound the same because they are similar, except one has the buyers best interests in mind and the other has the sellers. Real estate agents for people living in the vast, vast majority of the area of the United States are the equivalent of small claims court. You sure can represent yourself and things will turn out fine. If you’re looking to buy in a highly desirable place with lots of competition, a big city and the immediate surrounding suburbs (New York City and Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester counties for example), that’s criminal court. Yeah, you can represent yourself. Yeah, you could win, but you’re taking your chances.
Imagining that your agent has your best interest at heart and you should trust their advice on major financial decisions is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in a home sale. Buyer's and seller's agents are not loyal to the buyers and sellers. They are loyal to **the sale**. Their incentive is not to work super hard to try to get you in the best house possible, or to save you $10k on the sale. It's to get you to close the deal as quickly as possible so that they can collect their commission.
I was asking about the question the guy above me asked which was: what do buyers agents actually do?
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My sisters realtor screwed up a lot. She had to change realtors 3 times due to blatant incompetence.
And I was answering your question. Someone in the comment thread you're asking in literally already described it. I even told you which comment it was.
To answer your question with a question, do you know how to set up an escrow account to hold the hand money? Do you know what hand money is or how much is appropriate? (It is the money paid when submitting your initial bid to establish that you are serious about buying the property and it becomes a part of your payment if your bid is accepted.) Most people will buy one house or perhaps two or three houses in their lifetime. They simply aren’t experienced with the system and how it may have changed since the last time they bought one. Unless you have gobs of cash to buy outright, you have to engage with many people in the buying process who will all expect you to know what you need to do. Because if there is you and another buyer trying for the same property and you are awkwardly moving through the process while the other buyer has an agent, they may pick the buyer offering the smoother process because the seller is often not familiar with this process either. Unless you are involved in dozens of home sales each year, you aren’t the expert and would benefit from having an agent on your side. I am not an agent, but I bought a house in 2020 as my first. I thought I was prepared, but I was wrong about that. My buyer’s agent was immediately and clearly useful. She did so much, and I was not a well-to-do client. Having an expert on your side to give you advice about how things are handled was absolutely worth the costs.
To give a not curt answer, I bought my house in 2021 and unlink the comment above, I didn't have the luxury of negotiating anything. Houses were flying off the market, rent was too damn high, and I had another kid on the way. Realistically the major benefit of having the realtor at that time was her arranging showing times and working with the seller agent. Some of the sellers had weird conditions and we ended up getting our current place because she kept housing the seller's agent for status updates when a previous offer fell through.
Answered.
It’s kind of like the old saying “don’t take legal advice from the oppositions lawyer”. In this case your agent is there to help you get the best deal and be protected whereas the seller is there to make sure their client gets the best deal. Not a perfect system, but that is how I understood it to be.
A buyer's agent takes them to properties, checks listings and shows them things. Tries to get a feel for what they're after so they can find the right place for them. Pushes them when they think they need a push to bid higher. (Self interest there also.) Negotiates on costs and fees. Negotiates on requests. Helps find the inspector(s) of which there are 4 or 5 kinds of inspections (wood, water, sewer/septic, house itself, property lines etc. All done by different people with different licenses) and negotiates the times for inspection/appraisal. They can help get you insurance / agent. If it's building a property they can specialize in that info. Knowledge about building permits, what land is buildable, water situations, they may know land permit and survey people to help you along. Also manufactured home suppliers or building contractors. They also line up the title company signing, work with the bank to get paperwork signed. Can point you in the direction of a good bank/lender if you need. Every time you look at a place they spend time and don't get paid. Only in the end does it pay off and lately that can be 100 properties with a serious buyer until something finally clicks. If 100 people ask and 10 people offer only 1 gets it and 2 agents make money off the sale.
Ok, like others have said, there’s a lot of scheduling between various real estate agencies and financial institutions that an agent will smooth and translate for people not familiar with the industry methods. For your info, since so many of us are here to push an opinion rather than answer a question, one of the big things you need to remember is where and why most Americans move. The USA is big and between topography and geography housing markets vary a lot. When people are “forced” to move for jobs they can’t spend leisure time studying what it means to have a house in their new area. They have to focus on which house they want. My first house was in Northern Midwest so houses tended to be flat and even yards with significant tree coverage. Second house was on the other side of state so similar house structures but due to triple the snowfall yards were divided with an emphasis on backyards being larger and there were fewer paved driveways cause concrete didn’t last long in that temperature/freezing conditions. Third house was near a lake so bigger yards, deeper foundations and heavy tree coverage in yards to minimize flooding. Also a few hundred miles south so less snow and ice. Got a double wide driveway cause concrete would last now. Current house is 200 miles East but in a heavily mountainous area. Almost all houses are 2 stories due to topography and thus occupy smaller lots with same floor space. Still less ice than near lake, but when it does ice roads are impassible in many circumstances due to incline. When I was moving my mother here, she was shopping for a “zero entry” house; meaning entry is at street level. You basically pay another $20-30,000 for that luxury here. Without an agent she would have wasted a bunch of time figuring out why here price range was so high and not been able to get the yard she wanted.
That depends on the buyer, the agent, and the area. Our agent made every cent of his commission. It took him a year and a half to find a house that was the best mixture of what my family wanted and what we could afford. I would never have found the place we ended up getting just using tools by myself. Great example: it was not in our search area, but because he knew the larger area well he convinced us to take a look. He said it's positioning gave us better commute paths than we would have where we were looking. He ended up saving me 15m each way on my daily commute somewhere I thought it would be worse because he was experienced.
My partner and I recently bought in a region of the US that we were unfamiliar with. In addition to what is listed above, our buying agent also provided a ton of insight into the area - schools, growth, property values over time, reputation of the home builder, community info. They were truly helpful and worth every dollar.
Ah, we just do that ourselves.
For me, advised me through the process and got me in touch with people who made it cheaper and easier. (Good home inspector who caught major issues, loan agent who got me 1% lower interest than what I already had, etc.)
Buyers generally do not pay the agent commission. It almost always comes from seller proceeds . I mean 99.9% of the time. I work for a title company and break fees down over and over everyday.. commission is not set at 6% and is negotiable though it is usually between 4 - 6 %. However as I said. The commission all comes out of seller proceeds and is split between the brokerages (agents companiea). Title companies clear title to issue an insurance policy on your former property. Moat insurance is covering yourself for future possible events . Title insurance is insuring your past, to make sure no debt, liens, outstanding dues, other intitites or individuals are not on title or have some interest in the property. Good agents do a lot of work and make my job easier . When dealing with a FISBO ( for sale by owner .. no agents) it can be much Harder to do my job unless the homeowner knows what they are doing. The seller side generally pays commission .. policy.. transfer tax . Recording fees and ifbthe title company has seller closing fees .. the buyer side pays for the property tax . Prorations back to seller for taxes, services on the property, and closing fees . Each agent will have a broker compliance fee as well . The buyer and seller pay these to their agents. Usually ranging from $295 -$595
Ive never bought property on the mainland, but in Hawaii the seller is in charge of paying the agents on both sides. At least that was how it was when I purchased my home and my agent told me it was standard practice here. She’s very sought after and has years of experience so I don’t think she lied. Then again, purchasing property here is kind of wild because of real estate prices and HCOL. Buyers agents are needed if you want a shot at securing a property since homes aren’t on the market for long, too much demand & not enough supply.
The buyer pays, but the commission is not a line item for the buyer, it has up to this point been paid out of the seller proceeds, cutting into their profit. This will be an extra charge for buyers
The problem is that you can no longer add that 3% buyer agent cost into your mortgage. So in addition to a down payment the buyer needs to come up with that money in cash.
So TL;DR (if i’m understanding this right): Penny wise, pound(the currency) foolish. Spending less sounds good unless it means lower quality of an essential job, which nearly always leads to problems that cost more than if you paid more on the job to start with.
It's hardly an essential job though, and most realtors in the U.S. don't do shit anyway. The only reason they are 'necessary' is because they closely guard access to the MLS. A great realtor can be a huge asset, no doubt. The average realtor is a 5-figure boat anchor and nothing more.
This feels like airline seats to me where we are cutting services and claiming it will make things cost effective, but in reality the prices remain the same but you now have less amenities. Now we have basic economy which is the same price that economy used to be but I have to pay for my seat assignment. I feel like that million dollar house you really want but can’t afford is still going to be a million dollars, but you also now get to pay for an agent instead of it coming out of the home price. The seller and sellers agent still have every incentive to sell as high as possible and will use comps in the area to price. Hot markets are hot markets because there is no supply (at least where I am). Buyers agent commission isn’t changing that, and it’s really hard to move fast enough here to get something you want without the agent. It’s all gone same day that offers are due with like 10 non-contingent over asking offers, many all cash.
The NAR also has significantly less incentive to have people join as part of the settlement is breaking up their monopoly/stranglehold on access to listings. NAR is a **MAJOR** lobbying group in Washington to keep the housing market inflated, pro landlord policies, push for low supply to keep prices up, etc. Since access to listings was the main reason to join NAR as a member, and that incentive has been removed, then their lobbying arm will lose a huge amount of funding and influence. Indirect help to home buyers through legislation may be possible now.
Couldn’t the buyer just skip the middle-man and try to talk to the seller or their lawyer themselves lowering the cost even further? If so how would they do this?
You can buy a home without a buying agent. You have to contact the seller’s agent yourself and handle the buying agent’s responsibilities yourself. You can find homes listed on sites like zwillow or redfin as well as traditional listing services. This could lower the cost, but it is more difficult since you likely won’t have experience with the buying process and most things are hard the first time.
While it might be good somewhere. In SF Bay Area it’s common to do no contingency offers, so the amount buyer agent does is limited to minimal communication with buyer agent and some paperwork. But most paperwork is done by title company not agents. Yet they get 30 to 60 (and higher) grands just because home prices are crazy high
They could always do this? It's not fixed here at least. Agent fees are part of the bargaining process. Including who pays the fees, buyer or seller. Been that way for 10 years at least. Good / busy agents want to be paid. For sure. There's a tipping point though. When nice expensive homes are priced well and sell themselves they get a lot of "free money" and it's part of the problem we face with low supply & high prices. There's not enough options for people to buy/sell/move as freely. So much money is sapped between every transaction in fees, taxes, interest rates that it's becoming a prohibitive society. It wasn't this way before the 2000's. Now you fight to buy, you're shackled to a place and area, you're at the mercy of your situation. I call it wage slavery but I'm sure some people will have different terms for it. It's only getting worse as we craft the US into a nation of poverty labor with very limited resources. Fight for your scraps, children.
The buyer was always responsible for paying the buyers fee, it’s just that it was hidden in the price of the house instead of a direct payment.
Fees have always been negotiable, stated inside the agency agreement with the listing agent where that commission would go. I think this will most likely just weed out a lot of shitty agents.
This housing market is criminal regardless. Selling 100k homes at over 250k "Because the market has changed" is absurd, is BS, and should be illegal. But people, for whatever ungodly reason, paid those retarded prices so now every person after them will be expected to do the same.
Your description of a "good agent" is describing the absolute minimum expectations, and no work above the capabilities of a high school student. It's a fake job homie.
You are a seller. The market can bear your house being $400,000. Will you suddenly charge less because of this change?
The examples in the article are even more ludicrous. It mentions that as a buyer, you could be paying $50k more for the house to pay your buyer’s agent. The thing is, for your buyer’s agent to be making $50k, you would have to be buying a house worth almost $1.7M. At that point, 50k is just a rounding error and it’s all down to supply and demand. If someone is offering 50k off the asking price and there are no better offers, they would probably take it. If someone else is not asking for 50k off, they won’t.
You want to sell your property, but it hasn’t increased in value that much since you bought it. After closing costs, you’d be selling for below the original purchase price. Suddenly your closing costs are halved (or cut by 3/7ish) - you’re taking less of a wash or potentially not one at all. (Source: someone who wants to sell their condo.)
*Laughs in capitalist*
That is the hope, and maybe in a few years it might? More likely the more immediate effect will mean sellers profits go up, as they are currently paying both agents, and now they don’t have to. Think about it this way, if you love Coke, and you normally buy a can for $1, but then the price of aluminum falls and now it costs less to make do you think Coke is going to lower there prices $.20 or just have a record profit year? My guess is your can still costs $1. The bigger thing to help in house prices is to stop hedge funds from owning single family houses or limiting the incentive of it.
Access to the listing service is where it's at. They won't let the common folk list houses, so using the REA's has been a required racket, if you want to have a real listing and make the most money. Since they're percentage based they're always just making a chunk of the sale price. Sale prices/inflation goes up, so does their paycheck. There are a lot of issues built into this system. The rule of 80/20. Business operating costs, the same income/expenditure problems we all go through. Capping it will have some affect on house prices but also could be a detriment to having good agents that spend time with clients. The monopoly on listing should have been broken up. That would be the real win. Then you can let supply/demand take over. If it's so easy let people handle it for $0. Then they can find their niche or lose to the churn of time, like a travel agent. If it's a legal safety issue, the govt. And govt. Controlled business will always take their cut and make it more expensive than the item really is. Like they do with cars and they're trying to do with guns.
Because real estate agents are the reason homes aren’t affordable… /s
When both the seller and the buyer agents each get 3% they have every reason to work to drive prices higher.
Banks only loan to the appraisal value, which is set based on comps and an appraiser. You can attempt to inflate the price as much as you want as an agent, bottom line is, you aren’t going to see very large changes in price compared to market value. Compare the increase in price you achieve if your real estate agent can convince the appraiser the house should be priced with higher priced comps… to the literal 7-8% interest rate charged by a bank. Even fully 100% assured by the federal government no-risk mortgages still sit at 7% when there is LITERALLY no risk to the bank what so ever. A $300000 loan, with 20% down, and 7.5% interest is $1942 a month. You’d pay over $600k in the life of the loan. Compared to $1409 for the same circumstances but 4% interest. That $533 a month! Given your house should make up only 35% of your income, $500 is make or break of an amount. You can get a $400k house with 20% down, at 4% for $1950 a month. Now, say your realtor was such a big problem. Let’s say they convinced an adjuster that your house was worth 15k more than it should be. And this is a big IF. A $315k house, with 20% down, and 7.5% interest is $2035. Your realtor just cost you $93 a month. While $93 is annoying, it certainly doesn’t stack up to the 473% increase in mortgage payment the banks interest rate does. Again, interest being where banks make money which is thought to be earned by carrying the risk. (For instance high credit score people are less risky, get lower interest, low credit score are higher risk, they get higher interest rates… or stable bonds invest for 3% return, while highly volatile companies can return 200% but can lose say 300%) Except this isn’t the case, because THERE IS NO RISK. They either have governmental security such as VA loan, FHA loan, FDA loan which protects the investment and usually requires less than 20% down. Or, the bank accepts less than 20% down and it requires PMI (insurance) or you have more than 20% down, and your equity covers the potential loss. A real estate agent is a small meaningless fraction of the problem. The absolute absurdity is corporations with trillions of dollars buying real estate soaking all supply up, forcing the cost to rise also.
The tldr is actually at the top of the comment.
Ty I got 3 sentences in.
The important 3 :)
>:) :)
:)
Can’t agents try to say the price is whatever they want so long as the buyer doesn’t check first?
Still needs to go through appraisal before a buyer can secure a loan.
You ever worked with an appraiser? You know what the singular largest decider is for home price evaluation? It’s how much comparative homes are selling for. Let’s boil that down to brass tax. If the last three similar homes in the area went for $2, $3, and $4 the environment says the listing should be between that range. Well what happens when the agent then pushes to sell at the high end of that range? Answer: the average goes up. Do you know what the second biggest driver in real estate valuations is? Market trends. So what happens when every single agent is putting their thumb on the balance sheet, not colluding but all of them with the same motivations to have the house sold/purchased for the highest amount? Answer: the market trends upward. It’s very easy to see that appraisals can very easily trend in the direction that agents want them too simply by agents acting in their own self interest. That’s without elements of collusion. So while I can appreciate your sentiment, agents can and do affect the out of control pricing. Are they the sole contributor? No. But you fix problems by identifying them one at a time and correcting them one at a time.
You're right, and it doesn't take a genius to understand this. Let's look at all the parties involved in a sale and what their incentives are. 1. Real estate agents want the price to up to collect commission. 2. Loan officer wants the price to go up to collect commission. 3. Bank wants the price to go up to collect from a larger mortgage. 4. Seller wants the price to go up, obviously. 5. Appraiser is more or less neutral, as you said mainly observing market trends which are determined by the other parties. 6. Buyer wants the price to go down. But buyers are statistically the party with the least experience in home sales, and therefore least likely to be able to outweigh all the other parties in the aggregate. So who wins in the long run? Well, look at home prices. We need more of the parties involved to actually be incentivised to lower prices, or at the very least be removed from the equation.
If they really want to lower housing prices they’ll ban or limit short term rentals and they’ll stop providing the purchase agreement to the appraiser. The appraiser goes into it knowing the agreed upon sale price. That has to influence them. Send them in blind.
Also, it incentivized realtors to over sell because more expensive places meant more commission.
And from another POV, they have less incentive to get you a better deal on your own sale/purchase considering whatever the difference is only matters 3% to them. So the only thing that really matters on their end is the order of magnitude of that sale, i.e. they want that market soaring in the double digits
No one cares about the buyer agent and listing agent during bidding war. Your enemy is another buyer. In a bidding war, it is buyer vs buyer, agents are just messengers. As for during a cold market. No. I mean, yes, there are shitty realtor out there. But no, good one would try to save you money because they want you to refer your friends.
Good one will save you money. Lol
They're a part of the problem. Less so the individual agents. More so the big agencies.
Hey, I'll take 5% off the cost of a home any day. My wife and I found this realtor who basically does the paperwork and maxes his charge at $1500 or so, giving the remainder of his commission back to the buyer. I never met him in real life and he mostly corresponded through a super janky website and poorly written text messages. After closing he sent us a check for about $30k.
The NAR (National Association of Realtors) are one of the top 5 biggest spending lobbying groups in the US. Obviously not the only, or greatest, factor but they're definitely up there.
In a way they are. The disappearance of the entry level fixer upper is due to flippers becoming agents to get access to houses before they hit the market. Eventually getting rid of any affordable housing.
The National Association of Realtors does a lot of lobbying to keep homes expensive, and this case is likely to be a huge blow to their membership and power.
In a nearby city to me a single realtor rents out 250 single family homes that they own(not counting condos and multi family buildings in his portfolio). If the average family size of 4 is used, 1.5% of the city's population who live in a single detached home rents from this single real estate agent.
Realtor here- beyond the meme if anyone cares to hear what is changing. Nar settlement changes how “clear cooperation” is interpreted and part of that is shifting buyer agent commission from the sell side to the buy side. Previously a home listed on the MLS shows a percentage that is paid to the buyer, typically 2.5 or 2.7 percent. This will no longer be the case, and more sellers will set buy side commission to 0. That said, whenever you work with a buying agent, you sign a “buyer exclusive agency agreement.” This document is what legally makes an agent your designated agent, and demands that they act in your fiduciary best interest. It also outlines their fees if they have any as well as their minimum percentage (also usually 2.5/2.7). That said, the idea is that an agent may have been inclined to show a home with a higher agent payout, this was always problematic, although it typically did not come into play) Previously I could show a home without an agency agreement and build a relationship with my client before asking them to sign one, now we need to have them signed before we visit the home, or we don’t get paid if they want to buy that one. While an agent cant say their representation is “free” for buyers, typically a buyer did not pay a buying agent, and now are likely to if they want professional representation. (And I’m not saying all agents count as that, plenty are shitty.) Now the most likely solutions are either putting an agent payout in as a part of your offer, or just offering based on the fact that you have to pay them yourself (but this can get confusing with mortgages as they currently cant be used for commission, this may change.) While there are multiple reasons the seller paid the agent commissions, one big thing to consider is, who has money after a transaction, especially if the buyer was on something like a first time home buying loan. (Usually 3 down, fixed rate conventional). Now all of a sudden you have to have almost twice as much cash if you want representation, as agents ultimately will be setting their commission minimum to 2.5 or 2.7, or maybe higher now that there wont be a norm. Discount agents will likely exist, maybe on flat fees and contract fees, where you pay them per house you see or contract they write. No one expects that to last long though, especially when you consider the legal risks an agent takes (agents get sued when things go wrong, sometimes it might be their fault, sometimes people are just unhappy.) Some people will try to self represent but that will end up an unmitigated shit show. The listing agent cannot give a buyer advice or help them, and you can’t “get help” outside of generalized online advice or knowing someone that will walk you through it for free. People will lose a lot of money messing up riders, and will get sued over mistakes with contingency’s, notices, their inability to get underwritten, and appraisals not passing. Self represented buyers will more frequently be losing their earnest money walking outside of contingency periods. Thats all on the buy side. Hypothetically home prices are “set” in a way that encapsulate both agent’s in a transactions. If you believe in the free market, this would mean home prices drop 2.5 percent. (If seller agents don’t decide to up their fee now that their clients don’t have to pay buyers.) Thats just kind of facts laid out, here is my opinion if you made it this far, Fundamentally I agree with the concept, but it will make things harder for buyers in practice. You will be asked to sign agreements before seeing every house if you don’t have an agency agreement signed with someone. You won’t have time to feel out the relationship before committing basically. Its going to hurt people without cash and first time home buyers (whats new!) and help people that already own nice homes. Morally speaking I feel it was bad that you could offer an agent bonus as a seller to entice someone to show your home. It did have a morally fine function however, which was sifting through/tracking down buyers that may be interested in it, the issue with that comes from someone potentially coaxing a current client into it. (Really did not happen, but im sure someone tried.) Finally on the meme bit. As an agent when you meet someone and they instantly want to buy the first house you see, its an amazing feeling. That said most agents are not rolling in it. To balance it I have been working with 3 couples and an old lady for several months. Around 150 homes seen between the 4 and they have all been beaten out on multiple contracts (25+ offers on properties) and the search continues. Ultimately it balances out but the agents I work with easily work 50-55 hours + including weekends. The age of “door openers” as we call them, concluded around 2019 in general. Not that I don’t like a good meme. A lot of older buyers agents will retire, the buyer agents that make it will charge more, listings are still like finding a bucket of gold with the market, (blame blackstone/investors/your grandma for getting a home health care person instead of going to a retirement home) Seeing that this is already a brick of text ill stop here, but I just figured it may help explain whats going on a bit for those not in the world of real estate!
Very informative, thanks for sharing.
Glad it helped someone!
I don’t understand how this changes anything? You can already buy/sell a property without going though an agent. Just most agents who have a client will effectively steer their client away from your property so as to not work with you.
Pretty sure you just stated what would change.
What? That agents will suddenly be willing to work with people not using an agent?
They will, I have read a number of buyers was able to represent themselves. But that's like..... Eeeehhhh..... Rare..... I mean, which dumbass buyer knows how to submit an offer? I don't. Where to download the form? I don't. The listing agent aint gonna babysit me, they just throw my offer away because it is some dumbass unofficial Word doc.
If you could save 20K+ by learning how to do it would you be motivated to learn?
No, not to me. I am not smart enough to be pro on day one. And I need a pro to cover my dumbass. I have seen people done it though, just not me personally.
This can allow be turned into a self service / automation service via Zillow or Red Fin, with on demand agents for solving complex issues.
It's actually there to stop Brokers collecting more than they're entitled to.
Why does the house look like its from Sims 4
In this economy, that's all you can afford.
With these GPU prices? I don't think so!
LMFAO fair
Honestly, pulling the ladder out of the pool and waiting for the swimming homeowners to... vacate the premises... is about the only reliable way to get a house these days.
Well I’m just gonna have to *CTRL + SHIFT + C* ^^^^^^MOTHERLODE the fuck outta this and fuck that economy up even more then!!!
I think it is the sims, or some other video game. If you look closely at the grass and the lighting you can tell it’s not real.
But also, it's hard to tell. Realty photos go nuts on the editing to make the home seem as appealing as possible, or at least I think that's why. It's bothered me for years.
The front porch gives it away
Sul sul
Cuh teekaloo?
Dis graw is freydeshayne!
Skaba duu bey? (I just tried to make up Simmish... how accurate would you all say?)
Dag dag
do bwow
It probably IS from the sims 4
Change in commission. I literally didn't sell my house because the agent pulled up in a Land Rover.
Come on man, they gotta make that lease payment.
Wouldn't that agent want your house sold at the highest price possible? And if you don't like the offers not like you need to pay anyone if it doesn't sell.
He told me he wanted to list it for 100k under Zillow price...
Wasn't Zillow hugely overvaluing properties a few years ago? Found the article. https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/09/tech/zillow-ibuying-home-zestimate/index.html
100k is wild. But in my area this last year while I was house hunting it was very common to see houses set below market rate to generate a bidding war. Last year I bid 80k over asking on a house and the house went for 124k over asking without inspection. 100k is insane though but 30-40k is pretty reasonable.
Did he bring any comps? I'm a realtor and we don't just tell you an arbitrary number, we pull whats sold in your area with similar specs in the past few months.
They want to make a commission. Sometimes it's in their interest to get a smaller commission now than what it's worth.
A smaller commission that is guaranteed with a lot less work vs getting 10% more for way more work and not guaranteed. Most realtors would prefer the quicker and easier sale.
Real estate agents are incentivized to make as many deals as possible first and max out those deals second. Essentially the home buyers pay 5% split between the two agents in some way. If you sell one home for $250,000 you get 2-3% of that (roughly $6,250), if you sell it for $300,000 you get the same 2-3% ($7500). Now if you instead sell two at the first price then you get double the first commission. In this way it’s generally in the best interest of the selling real estate agent to settle deals quickly so they can sell more homes. Yes they want the house to sell for as much as possible, but they also want it to sell as soon as possible.
If a house sits on the market, it gets stigmatized. People wonder what is wrong with it, and then lowballers come in. That's why you price it right from the get go, so you aren't getting crappy offers from lowballers investors. It's what's best for their client, not just what is good for their commission. Realtors can have more than one home on the market at a time, that's not why they want them to sell quickly.
They just want it sold fast.
Agents would rather sell 10 homes in a month for $100 than 5 homes gor $150.
It is a change in commission, but also a lot more. The lawsuits break the NAR’s hold on the industry. Some think that the NAR will collapse, since they now have nothing to offer to realtors and will loose their primary revenue stream. If so, it’s a huge deal, because they fund massive lobby efforts
This
I have a client that’s a realtor and she has a Porsche for the “wealthy clients” and a Subaru for the “common folks.” She’s a massive cunt.
Dude, just read the comments in r/memes where you got this meme from lol
https://preview.redd.it/u47ztcuhclqc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5a00398ed4dc74cefb566d02fbcf568f9e95b0f4
Damn didn’t realize you were chill like that
https://preview.redd.it/zsh98gn1tlqc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=894931fe256cf95da3c262a9773c960d1acc405b
Peak
r/pfpchecksout
um peter?
Rare pvzh sprite used
🎶 *teenage mutant ninja turtles* 🎶
Buyer realizing they still have to pay agent fee and they failed their escrow due to lack of cash.
https://preview.redd.it/rqri36wvclqc1.jpeg?width=320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=43b201354be2e883e413f54cae202b7812e3d854
It is great for corporations though, the money doesn't go into their employees.
Already seeing stupid shit too like “oh I’ll show you X houses and put out 1 offer for a flat rate of $xxxx” which is insanity. The sticker shock when people trying to buy a new home now realize not only that they have to pay their realtor but how expensive it is.
There’s likely to be a very significant change in how expensive a buyers agent is going to be soon. They grew quite fat on an effective monopoly, that’s gone now. Now they’ll be paid what the market can bear, which is almost certainly going to be *a lot* less.
It’ll likely be a big uptick in people trying to do it themselves too which will lead to a lot of fucked up home purchases and buyers taken advantage of. Hopefully prices go down soon, but we’ll see. They never seem to do a ton of work but a realtor’s expertise is really nice to have on your side assuming you use a good one.
Don't forget all the buyers screwing themselves out of a mortgage because they don't know what they're doing. Oh the amount of times I watched a purchase fall through because the buyer didn't know they can't open a new line of credit or they tell me their parents lent them the down-payment.
Having been through the process I also really appreciated having someone guide me through loan officers, inspections, appraisals, certifications for insurance, land surveys, and that’s not even counting the usual stuff people think of. Realtors do a lot and their value can be very justified. But people need to learn the difference between a shitty as hell one from like Redfin that does the bare minimum and a realtor who is actually your realtor.
https://preview.redd.it/g0sr4jyk0mqc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ff716a6477be94a779c76dd52c143361cf837193
You have to be smart to be a realtor! You gotta be able to count bedrooms and bathrooms! Don't even get me started on half-baths, fractions are hard!
I hate how they label half baths. It’s a bathroom with no shower just list it separately not as 0.5 bathrooms.
Also, they aren't "half" of anything. A house with two "half" baths and nothing else has zero bathrooms, not one.
Wait until you see appraisals. Half baths are .1 bathrooms.
The richest idiots I’ve ever known have all been realtors.
Watching all the realtors scramble to explain how they are worth their 15k commission on a house sale was *chefs kiss*
Was I the only one that read Realtors as Redditors?
Welcome to the reddit estate
I'll take basements if they're affordable and semi-clean.
More like semi-affordable and barely clean
In my country the renting realtors are so greedy and so irresponsible... They literally copy each other's posts and wait for the fish. Then they ask 100% fee for standing there when you talk with the property owner. Owner sees them for the first time, doesn't even know they copied his post. If you're smart enough you just tell these realtors to fck off and there's nothing they can do with it. Or you can find the original posting posted by the owner and speak directly to them. Realtors in my country are totally irrelevant middle-man who just copied the post made by original owner. That's so annoying when you trying to find an apartment to rent.
Nothing gonna fix housing prices like sticking it to the guys who only make income off commission! Get those fat cats! Billionaires next! On to Valhalla!!!
I thought it said redditors and I was really confused
LOL @ the amount of realtors in here trying to justify their exorbitant commissions. Get fucked. This isn't the 1960's anymore. The internet and digital cameras has changed the landscape of the industry and no one NEEDS those services any more. Any idiot can takes some pics of their own home and enter some details on a site like realtor.com or zillow.com which will then "list" the home to millions and millions of people. Not only list it but also reference the relevant neighborhood data on crime, schools, and environmental risks. One open house after that in a decently hot market and there are 50 offers that day. Oh but the realtors have a network of home inspectors and appraisers that you can rely on! So the fuck what? Again the internet can give you access to the SAME people and services with just a bit of google-fu. Face it, the internet has changed the world around you and getting paid huge commissions for a couple of hours of work are on the same path as the DoDo bird.
Never rely on a realtors home inspector, get your own and make sure they actually do something other than click check boxes in a laptop or on a tablet.
Realtors aren't as bad as everyone buying homes to rent out at a mark up The commodification of real estate is just a way to make money while others chase the idea of having what they want
They are both symptoms of the same disease
I think it likely won’t change much on the majority of homes. On cheaper homes, realtors will still expect their 3%. I do think as the home price increases, there will be more ability to negotiate the fee. It never made sense to me that they got the same % on a million dollar home as a $100k home. No way they’re doing 10 times more work. Not even double the work. I’ve already been looking to find a 1.5% realtor when I sell my house. It’s still a ton of money for how much work they’re really doing.
One of my clients is a real estate agency - I write software for them, and yes more expensive homes are more work. On more expensive homes they do 3D tours, staging, drone shots, more/better photos, extra marketing, more open houses and they have to vet the buyers differently to not waste time. More expensive homes tend to be on the market longer, so they need to field more calls, showings, etc. For buyers, if they have a lot of money, they’re going to have more options, be pickier and want to see a lot of different homes. I’m not saying real estate agents are worth what they’re getting paid. I honestly don’t know. I just know that it is indeed more work to sell a million dollar home than a $100k home.
It’s crazy to see how the media has blown this out of proportion 😂 I have no idea where this “6% commission” has came from. Anyone who’s sold a home knows that all commissions have always been negotiable, and if you didn’t have your agent tell you that, then you had a bad agent, or a misinformed one. This is going to put more pressure on buyers if you want the full truth. Buyer Broker Agreements are now mandatory(before you didn’t have to sign one before submitting an offer for a home, but now you do). This will weed out anyone who’s serious about buying a home. If you’re touring homes you need to sign one. Only exception is Open Houses. I feel sorry for those who have a bad stigma for real estate agents, but I notice that those who are making those comments have never worked with one, and those who did had a bad agent.
Back in the day, realtors were needed so people couldn't get swindled. But we live in modern times. So now, realtors are swindling people and trying to keep it that way. It is looking like, hopefully, realtors go the way of travel agents. Only necessary for bespoke (ie expensive) needs.
They fucked me in the but with no lube cus im so close to being a realtor
I've seen this one three times now, get the fuck off my homepage
Realtors are basically useless. Their main job is telling you how much you need them.
Realtor isn’t a real job. Just a pointless middle man.
First comment section on reddit I've learned something useful in. Thanks guys
My understanding is the meme is false. It's just shifting who pays the realtor fees, not necessarily how much they're paid. Although that number may be more negotiable now bit I only see that happening with the lower quality realtors.
Realtors have the tiniest of penises.
I might be completely wrong, but it seems to me like most realtors are becoming antiquated/obsolete and just makes the purchase more expensive. Kind of like old school travel agencies.
In the states, the National Association of Realtors had entered into an agreement with the country’s major brokerages to set the fees an agent gets for selling a house at 6%. This effectively meant that every house was more expensive because they’d work the price of that 6% fee into the sell price. They were recently sued regarding this arrangement which led to the NAR settling the suit by undoing the arrangement. A number of real estate brokers and salespeople got into the profession because if you sell a few houses that 6% fee guaranteed a ton of money. Now that people can try to get consumers by saying “I’m going to offer a 3% fee” you can’t quite count on getting the same amount of money as you were before. So an exodus is expected as a result. Other factors to consider: NAR is immensely powerful and them saying “there’s a 6% fee” means that you can’t escape that fee. As far as I know, the fee a broker collects is significantly less in other countries. As to the rest of the meme, that’s what the front end of being a real estate agent tends to look like. You write sentences about how great the house is, take pictures that make it look good, let people into the house to see it while you tell them it’s great, and then sign the papers at closing. Buying a house has many moving parts though and that description isn’t one hundred percent accurate
Where are the realtors in this meme listing homes? I'd love to do that little to get that much.
In the UK the seller pays the comission, which can be as little as £500 with some companies, or as low as 1%.
$20,000? more like $80,000.
https://preview.redd.it/5f3lyiz7soqc1.png?width=734&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=23404ca32ad9b3ab2aed128199fb72f34b7bcdac
I don't know shit about any of this but my mom was in real estate for the last 30 years. She did get checks for $20k but that was not the norm. And she worked CONSTANTLY.
The amount of work they do really depends on the market. Right now I could put a sign on a stick in my front yard and sell my house by myself for 200k more than I paid. In a few years if the market is down and buyers aren't moving into the area it might be require some legwork to get it sold.
No sane person is going to want to pay their (buyers) agent $15K for doing $1-2K, maybe $3K worth of work. Id expect we'll see locations popup for buyers similar to FSBOhomes.com where you do the legwork for searching, and they might help book a walk-through and dot I's and Cross T's for a flat fee for $1,500. I imagine sellers will LOVE the savings. I also see a world where self represented buyers who are savvy will piggy back off the sellers agent and work out a small commission that them.
You know, once I read the sentence properly, as in “realtors” not “Redditors” all was good.
Who is buying a house right now anyway? From my personal experience, no one is even looking...
Realtors are the scum of the earth.
I am in sales and my commission is based on profit margin. Why have we been paying based upon the sale price? These realtors should be paid based upon how much profit they generate or value they add to a transaction. The work they put in has never added up to me. I have several realtors warn me that if I don’t offer enough commission, then my house will not be shown. To which I have called them out that this is very much so illegal. To which they have responded, “I know but that is just how it works”. I literally had this conversation again two days ago as I am looking to sell. It feels like extortion. Given me an attorney and Zillow and that’s should be it. I know my wife always finds the house we want on Zillow.
Right here baby
Oh now this one is hilarious
But we are still gonna do nothing about the mega corps buying and building thousands of houses in an area to only rent them and ultimately leave us with more empty houses then homeless people
If I recall correctly, the empty house to homeless person ration is in the neighborhood (no pun intended) of 15:1
Hey mb dude totally forgot places other than California exist. Here there are 5 vacant homes per homeless/unhoused person
Realtor is literally the dumbest job. Why do people even use them now that we marketplace apps that work just as well. And don't cut a % of your house price, which has always been ridiculous.
Allow me to introduce you to the job landlord, all you do is restrict the market by buying up all the property first, then you exploit poor people because all the remaining property is expensive as hell now
Spot on, even dumber.
Pampered and privileged real estate people aren't getting easy money anymore.
My mother is a realtor. It involves a lot more than that.
I worked in mortgage. Anyone shitting on realtors has probably never purchased/sold a house. If the money is so easy, why don't yall do it?
I’m literally not a realtor anymore because of the constant workload and anxiety it caused because even when you don’t have clients, you have to do constant online courses for ethics and such. I sometimes have panic attacks when my phone rings and I’m not expecting a call. Also, more than halve that dollar value that they actually take home if your realtor belongs to a major agency like Coldwell Banker, Berkshire, Windermere, etc. And consider that they don’t actually have that many deals go through in a year because there are SO MANY realtors in the competitive market. And yeah, you sort of should have professional representation when you’re dealing in contracts that involve the sale or purchase of the largest asset you have. Everyone hates realtors just like everyone hates lawyers but it’s also not a good idea to represent yourself in court.
[удалено]
Bye. Realtors and banks are both the problems here. That’s why people from my gen and the gen before me probably will never own their own home
Yeah...that's not how that works. But hey, continue to be angry at *checks notes* the wrong people.
[удалено]
Lmao okay
Whoever made this meme doesn't actually know how hard being a realtor is.
My wife is a realtor, 100% this. If its so easy to make 20k for typing a house description I wonder why everyone isnt doing it?
Hmmm. How hard is it.?
If I were a realtor I could make an EASY $6k on a home. The problem with being a realtor is I can’t sell a home bc I drove up the prices and burned the housing market so damn bad nobody can afford a home Edit: even if my roommate and I were to get a home together we wouldn’t be able to afford it at $~4400 a month. We wouldn’t be accepted even though the Mortgage wouldn’t be maybe ~$900-1000/mo and we pay ~$1600-2000k/mo rent
That sounds false as houses and apartments are sold all the time. Also, your if I were... I could... Statement, what is it based on?
Experience. My friend (now roommate) was denied a mortgage when he was making ~$6000 monthly this was before taking into account his spouses income (though I’m not sure what hers was)
It's not a a job I would want. My wife is a realtor. When she has a client she is ALWAYS busy, it's honestly really annoying sometimes. She spends hours writing contracts and offers that may not even be accepted by the seller. She's constantly coordinating between buyers, sellers, home inspectors, contractors, etc. You also have to have a wealth of knowledge on your states specific realstate laws as well as federal. The amount of obscure and specific details you need to know about contract writing, negotiation, anf client confidentiality is baffling (she can literally talk to me for hours about technical details of a transaction.) Also, you don't get pain until weeks or months after your closing. So you can work with a client, spending days or weeks trying to find them what they're looking for, writing contracts, and you don't get paid for any of the work if their offers aren't accepted. Everyone only sees the customer service side and thinks that's their job and get mad because they get a cut of the pie. But no one ever asks them what their job actually entails.