What I've Learned About Realtors

[Mike Hollingsworth]

Unless you are a seasoned negotiator, I would never take this part on yourself. Too many pitfalls in such transactions and emotions run high.
5% sounds high, but a seasoned realtor will earn it back for you. Brothers in law who will do it for 4% are not worth it.

[Myk Rian]

Unless you are a seasoned negotiator, I would never take this part on yourself. Too many pitfalls in such transactions and emotions run high.
5% sounds high, but a seasoned realtor will earn it back for you.

Like my Daughter and SIL. The realtor they had kept telling another bidding realtor what their bid was. Cost them another 20% over listing price.

[Dan Hintz]

Our last realtor was absolutely awesome and definitely earned his 3%. Patience of a saint, that one. Once he understood what we were looking for, the spots he offered us really honed in on the mark. Yes, we found a lot of homes on our own, and in the end we selected a home we found, but that's okay. He held our hands, when needed, and saved us quite a bit with various options we never knew about (mortgage insurance transfers) or bringing in guys he works with a lot that have reasonable rates.

But I've talked to the bad ones... just long enough to know when to run away.

[Jim Matthews]

People are not frequent customers of an agent - maybe once every 10 to 20 years so the agent is not concerned about doing business with you again. It's not a glamorous job. Mike

This should be a sticky. I made mention of this, when we purchased our home in 2008.
The agent mainly steered us to remote, overpriced properties that were oversized.

My older son found our house, looking at the Sunday paper.

The agent resisted looking at the house, because it wasn't his listing
and would be forced to split the commission.

My Wife wanted to smooth over the agent's reluctance,
and I made it clear that if he didn't pursue the house,
he would lose us as clients, entirely.

I've never seen a man get so red.

People who work for you should do as you ask,
the first time.

It's an opaque process that adds cost to the price,
without adding value to the client.

With a good lawyer and a motivated seller,
buyers will soon render middlemen like Realtors obsolete.

[Curt Harms]

I have a good friend who is a realtor and I'm quite certain that not all realtors are the same. He helped me shop rental property. He knew very little about the houses he showed me because most of them weren't his listings. He found them as listings from other realtors in the multiple listing service. Around here, that is very common. We inspected the houses together and often he told me not to buy the house or offer a very low price for various reasons. That is not typical. The listing agency is being hired to work as the seller's agent whether he tells his customer or not.

In general, I agree with Mr. Launier's comments.

As I understand it (SWMBO was a Real Estate Broker for years), any agent is supposed to have the seller's (the one paying the commission)best interest at heart. The exception is a buyer's agent.

[Dick Strauss]

Curt,
I agree that they are supposed to but those that I have dealt with did not.

Mike Henderson is mostly right on the money!

Realtors don't really want to put in extra effort to sell our houses for $160k when it will sell very quickly at $150k. Let's say a house is definitely worth $155k and maybe $160k. The realtor would rather list it for $150k and sell it quickly than put in the extra effort to get you $5-10k more. Their sellers commission might total 3% (of the 6% total commission) but 1-1.5% often goes to the real estate agency/company (Century21, etc) and not the selling agent. So let's say they actually earn 1.5% for themselves of the $150k vs $160k sales price. This translates to $2,250 ($150k price) vs $2,400 ($160k price).

I don't think many of us would want to spend several more weeks or months trying to to sell the home for $160k (for the extra $150 in commission) when you know it will sell the first day at $150k (below market) unless your client insisted on it. This is why it is important to be educated about asking prices of homes as a seller to maximize your sales price and not just blindly trust your agents opinions. Most agents want to sell quickly at a lower price rather than maximize your return on investment.

Soapbox is now smashed!

[Shawn Pachlhofer]

good realtors are worth their weight in gold.

bad/lazy realtors aren't worth a plug nickel.

unfortunately, there's more of the latter, and not enough of the former.

[Charles Wiggins]

We've purchased two homes and sold our first, which involved two different realtors, so we've worked with four different realtors.

For our first purchase we used a fellow with The Buyer's Agent. They help people buy homes, and that's all they do. They don't sell, so they don't have listings, so you're not going to get into the "dual agent" situation where the firm, and maybe even your agent has a vested interest in selling a particular home.

Our buyer's agent was great. We sat down and worked out a profile together, and he would email listings to us almost every day. We would go through and decide which ones we would "drive by" to see if we were still interested after we saw the place and the neighborhood, etc. If something looked good we'd set up an appointment for a viewing, and he would always have pulled tax records and anything else he could get his hands on. He had worked as a builder so he was able to spot potential problems we would have missed. He would feed us as much information as possible then let us make all the decisions. The day we negotiated the purchase I bet we spoke on the phone 45 different times because he ran every single thing by us as they came up.

We had a very similar experience with the realtor who helped us find our current home. She wasn't quite as prepared all the time, and she did not have the construction background, but she was still pretty knowledgeable and would try to get any info she could to help when we got serious about a place. It is a smaller market, so the listings came every few days, but she would often include remarks about how suitable for our needs she felt one place or another would be, and she was usually dead on.

Our first attempt at selling was not so good. The realtor barely looked at the house and came up with a "seat of the pants" asking price, then sent another guy to photograph it. After three months and no bites he says, "all we can do now is cut the price." We parted ways and hired the guy our first buyer's agent said he'd hire if he needed to sell a house fast.

The new realtor came in and walked the house with us. He measured and did preliminary photos himself. The preliminary photos were to show the real photographer certain things he wanted to feature in the listing. When he left we had a list of quick repairs and spruce-ups to do. It still took a while to sell the house, but we started getting traffic the week after the new listing went up.

[Val Kosmider]

Happy Reading: Why So Many Realtors are Complete Morons:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/real-...te-morons.html

[Moses Yoder]

Auctioneers take huge commissions on small item sales. Do you mean to tell us nobody in your family can agreeably handle the simple task of selling these things to the rest of the family?

Nobody in the world can do this auction for less than he is charging us without actually giving us money for the privilege of doing it. His wife is also clerking for us which means all of the children can simply pay attention to the bidding and not have to work that day. This is not really a fair comparison to other realtor/auctioneers, I mention it simply because it does happen. Some people are independently wealthy because they used to own their own RV factory and simply don't need any more money. Other people are greedy.

[Shawn Pixley]

As others have said, there are good ones and bad ones. I have seen some incredibly unprofessional behavior. Still, there are good ones out there. I think you need to be very selective about choosing those who represent you. You really can't choose those that represent the other party. My criteria:

Ethics, fit, knowledge about the house type you are interested in /selling, area, work ethic, and network.

[Frederick Skelly]

I feel your pain. I've seen and worked with some bad ones, lazy ones and unethical ones. And I've fired realtors for laziness and ineptitude. But a good one is worth every bit of their commission.

Regarding the man who flamed your house without reason.... Spend $36 and buy a membership to Angie's List. Then write an honest, unemotional review of the realtor, stating ONLY the facts. That's what Angies List for what is for - providing consumer reviews of businesses based on your personal experiences. You will be doing someone else a favor by writing such a review. (I have no affiliation with Angie's List.)

Fred

[Mike Null]

I've bought and sold several houses. The realtor is the buyers representative. If you list with one be sure it is the one who will offer you the most in terms of advertising, internet listings, meetings, open houses etc. The larger companies are usually the best at this.

It is fair to compare realtors to car salesmen. Both are money motivated. But a good realtor acting as your buying agent can save you an enormous amount of time and get you very close to your specs.

+1 to whoever said don't offer them confidential info.

[Mel Fulks]

Some years back this state made it law that if you picked an agent he must represent YOU. Depends on the state. The realtor we used even went so far as playing us phone messages from other agents saying things like "can you get your people up $10,000?"

[Jason Roehl]

Some years back this state made it law that if you picked an agent he must represent YOU. Depends on the state. The realtor we used even went so far as playing us phone messages from other agents saying things like "can you get your people up $10,000?"

It's a nice law, but the reality is still that they're working on commission, so the quicker there's a sale, the sooner they get their money. Knowing your price range ahead of time means they know the approximate maximum they can make off you, so each additional house they show you costs them more time, and lowers their profit margin. If you know you're going to make about $2000, would you want to show someone 100 houses or 10?

That said, I see a lot of incompetence. Of the people around me who have purchased or sold homes in recent years, most of them have had some kind of paperwork problem that pushed back the closing date. It's like it's the title company's and realtor's first time doing a transaction every time. I remember when I bought my first house (I was 21, zero experience), we had a closing at 10 AM. We were told at 9AM that we would need certified funds for our down payment (I thought I could write a check). Had to scramble to make that happen.