Real Estate Agents
- Thread starter CyState85
- Start date
For those of you that have sold recently & used an agent, any luck with negotiating off the 6% mark?
I recently sold my Des Moines house on contract with no agent. I works out great, the buyer is paying me $XX per month which is more than my current monthly payment so we just apply the entire payment from him to our loan. Loan will be paid off in 9 years and the contract is 15 years, so the $XX per month for 6 years is cash in my pocket.
I consider it more of a public service. Letting the public know vital information.
Some realtors provide a lot of value. Some provide very little.
I think it depends a lot on how much work you want them to do, vs DIY - and your own ability to do said DIY. Do you know how to figure a good market price? Can you deal with the legal docs?
It also depends a lot on how hard your house will be to sell. A good starter home is going to sell itself, but if you have something bigger or problematic, that can be different. Having someone set a strategy can be good.
The beef I have is the %-based commission. It's not 3x the level of effort to sell a $300k home vs a $100k home. It ought to be more of a fee-based system. I think over time, places like FSBO will chip away at the semi-monopoly service that realtors provide, and they will have to compete on cost more directly.
Example:
my home is currently for sale. I put a lot of effort and cost into making it ready, and used a realtor, because it has some funky things. She priced it a bit high (I thought), but it sold the first weekend for almost the full ask price. So that's great. BUT the commission was going to be over $20k!! For appx 4 hours of work on her part. That's insane.
Not related to her, but the buyer cancelled the following week (forfeited escrow cash even) because he had the school district wrong. So it's back on the market. Bummer. Sadly she is putting in some more hours...
I think it depends a lot on how much work you want them to do, vs DIY - and your own ability to do said DIY. Do you know how to figure a good market price? Can you deal with the legal docs?
It also depends a lot on how hard your house will be to sell. A good starter home is going to sell itself, but if you have something bigger or problematic, that can be different. Having someone set a strategy can be good.
The beef I have is the %-based commission. It's not 3x the level of effort to sell a $300k home vs a $100k home. It ought to be more of a fee-based system. I think over time, places like FSBO will chip away at the semi-monopoly service that realtors provide, and they will have to compete on cost more directly.
Example:
my home is currently for sale. I put a lot of effort and cost into making it ready, and used a realtor, because it has some funky things. She priced it a bit high (I thought), but it sold the first weekend for almost the full ask price. So that's great. BUT the commission was going to be over $20k!! For appx 4 hours of work on her part. That's insane.
Not related to her, but the buyer cancelled the following week (forfeited escrow cash even) because he had the school district wrong. So it's back on the market. Bummer. Sadly she is putting in some more hours...
Yes. We had the wood floors refinished, and carpets in bedrooms replaced. Was about $4,500 all together. House looked like it was new construction. Even now in hot markets people want move in ready, and pay more for it.
The realtors seem to do less and less too. I think most of agencies have a specific person whose job it is to manage private showings and the realtor just gets a report or whatever.
We have friends that are selling their house right now and are motivated to sell. She mentioned today that some board or something with their agency had to approve each price drop.
We have friends that are selling their house right now and are motivated to sell. She mentioned today that some board or something with their agency had to approve each price drop.
1. I guess if you're unemployed and/or have a ton of time, sell a house yourself. But if you have a job/kids/friends/(*&^ to do, I say a good realtor is a no brainer and totally worth it!
2. Pocket listings are great. I'm not going to do an open house, put pics on the internet, list on the mls, blah blah blah. just give me a fair/market price in 1-10 days and that's the way to go.
2. Pocket listings are great. I'm not going to do an open house, put pics on the internet, list on the mls, blah blah blah. just give me a fair/market price in 1-10 days and that's the way to go.
Yes. I got my agent to do 5% with the agreement that my next purchase would come thru her ( i was looking at moving out of my condo and into a house ).
Certainly was well worth the cost - between staging, documents, and negotiation. Not to say i couldn't handle some of that, but certainly made it easier.
For 10 grand+ i think one can find ways to make time. Like it'd probably even be worth taking some time off from work unpaid (so long as it didnt cost the job, of course). You're potentially saving months worth of income.
So let's see, you are going to take time off of work every time someone wants to look at your house because saying you will only show it on your schedule is going to turn buyers away, time to let their appraiser come to appraise your house, time for their inspector to come through your house, time to answer questions from them or their realtor, time for them to do a final walk through, hmm... sounds like a lot of time off to me.
Also, are you going to follow-up with everyone that looks at your home and get their opinion of why they didn't come back? Are you ready to open a bank account to hold their deposit check? Are you willing to work on the time frame of the inspector, appraiser, etc. who want to come during normal business hours when it fits their schedule?
You guys all forget that most buyers seem to be dead broke and now demand, and get, 5-6% of their closing costs handed to them by the sellers. Getting crazy. Seen houses go for 10k more than asking and get a 15k kickback for closing costs.
To be clear if the commission is 6% the buyers agent is getting 3% with some going to their company and the selling agent is getting 2.5% with their company getting .5%
I negotiated down to 5% with my agent which he was fine with cause he got paid on the house we purchased.
I negotiated down to 5% with my agent which he was fine with cause he got paid on the house we purchased.
This is absolute worst case scenario. We just sold in June, this was our experience:
1) We did not decline a single showing, but ~90% of them were either weekday after 4pm, or on a weekend = no time off.
2) Inspector & appraiser did not require us to be home. For anyone with a digital doorknob, or garage keypad = no time off.
3) Our realtor gave us next to zero feedback (said even when he regularly follows up with realtors, they rarely provide any). The little feedback we did receive was about things we would never change anyway, so feedback was worthless.
4) You do not need to open a bank account to hold a $500 deposit check. If a buyer really wants to be stringent on that, you can hire a 3rd party for well under $10k.
You're over-exaggerating big time.
