Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Thanks for addressing an aspect of what I was wondering about. Could you expound further? Why are a realtor's expenses vastly greater for a more expensive home?
that can get to be a very complex conversation dealing with overheads and other costs. Basically to sell a small unit I end up doing a minimum of work. Basically a listing agreement and and an MLS listing. I may then get into photography, inside and outside brochures web sites and other such stuff. But on a low end listing I may well have it sold before I take the first picture. At that point I simply grind the system until the escrow closes. It is not effort free...things go wrong. Paperwork gets screwed up. A bank decides at the eleventh hour it won't do the financing. The water heater dies or someone rips off the appliances. But most transactions slide through smoothly.
Expensive houses you get to do it all. The fancy pictures. High quality virtual tours. Well printed booklet describing the home. Ads in higher end publications. Staging or dealing with a furnished home. The drone pictures. Then months and months of waiting. Often on high end you have to attend every showing.
And the big one is that the small homes are at contract in a few days. The big ones in a few hundred days.
And on the bigger more expensive homes the normal agent rant of lower the price is not relevant. Pretty much set a reasonable price and stick to it. Maybe a couple of minor decreases simply to trigger the computer searches. The only way you move the expensive homes is to drop the price low enough to attract a flipper who will work it over and put it back on the market at or above the original list.
During the foreclosure wave, 2 areas I was looking at had some great values. Sign with realtor's number, and "Foreclosure" clearly visible. The realtors almost never answered the phone; returned call? Never. Your first actual connection was to inform you that the property sold. Starting 2013-14 on, I noticed many of these same homes listed again at 25 - 40% more than they sold (they were not stripped or even dated - these were <10 years old; some brand new). A little snooping and guess what? Realtors were snapping up those foreclosures, blocking potential buyers, apparently trading them among themselves, and then selling them at a big profit in just a couple years. If this isn't fraud, I don't know what is. So where's the class action lawsuits? Am I the only one who saw this? I bet not.
Most foreclosure agents don't even want buyer calls. Some just simply ignore them. A buyers agent could have gotten you the info and showed those foreclosures. Did you learn anything or you still here eating those sour grapes thinking you got cheated out of something?
What Redfin wants from the market is to bend pricing to the benefit of large companies, so they can squash small companies.
What could be more abusive?
The Cartel thing is overblown. And, to the extent it lives at all, it is at the State level not the Federal level.
The thing not understood is that the big brokerages really can't make it off the split anymore. Here virtually all successful agents have high splits mostly 100%. So the brokerages have to make it off desk rent and fees. And they can't charge the agents high fees or the good ones just move down the block.
In Microeconomics, there is a concept of the "optimal firm size" where average costs are lowest. The firm expands from small to optimal size because of economies of scale; at the optimal firm size, greater expansion incurs diseconomies of scale. You've pretty much described brokerages either at or exceeding optimal firm size. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social...imal_firm_size.
I haven't had great experiences with realtors. One lady could not get the contract right. I had to go over it with her three different times, pointing out all of the errors that she had made. Then there were the late arrivals to appointments, kids crying in the background when I called her, etc.
I'd love to see them go the way of travel agents. Same with car salesmen.
Why do I have to go through some idiot to buy a car or house?
I'm a mortgage broker in Florida; very fast paced world for me; small firm.
I work with realtors - listing agents and selling agents. Most of the realtors I work with treat their work as a full time job and are true professionals.
Believe me, they earn every cent.
Before someone writes an article or has a TV show, how about actually working in the industry and seeing how challenging it can be?
Yes, sometimes, you get lucky. Not always.
There is a lot more work to the job than meets the eye.
I haven't had great experiences with realtors. One lady could not get the contract right. I had to go over it with her three different times, pointing out all of the errors that she had made. Then there were the late arrivals to appointments, kids crying in the background when I called her, etc.
I'd love to see them go the way of travel agents. Same with car salesmen.
Why do I have to go through some idiot to buy a car or house?
Most of our experience with agents has been good to excellent.
But we did have one who repeatedly made big mistakes—very sloppy work. Things such as reversing Buyer and Seller names on the paperwork, wrong street address of our listed property not once but twice (one on an offer and one on a counteroffer—DIFFERENT wrong addresses each time!), TWO errors in estimated closing cost, an unchecked box that should have been checked on the Authentisign document (the resulting error, if we sellers had not caught it, would have cost us a lot of money; it benefited the would-be buyer even though our listing agent prepared the document). That was the first agent, one with a lot of experience.
Yeah, we let that listing contract expire, and gladly.
Luckily, the second agent we listed with did much better.
There are always discount brokers who will list your house for 4% or even better. Especially in a sellers market you really only need to get your house on the MLS. Another agent will normally bring a buyer not your listing agent. The house will sell itself. So why would you pay them 6% or more? To put your house on the MLS? You don't need open houses these are normally just for the real estate agent to meet new clients.
The people that do most of the work is the escrow company not the real estate agents.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Defending the real estate professionals
