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I'm getting ready to put my house up for sale. The realtor has agreed to lower the fee to 3.9%. The problem is that they have added other fees that I don't believe is right.
Title Insurance - $2623.00
Tax Stamps - $747.00
Sub Escrow $65.00
Wire Fee - $25.00
Escrow Fees - $1558.00
Document Prep - $60.00
Home Warranty - $400.00
Termite Report - $65.00
Misc. Fees - $300.00
Legal Protection - $299.00
The listing price on the house is $679,000.00
Do these fees sound right? I feel like I'm getting taken somewhere.
The realtor isn't the one adding those fees. Those are fees added by the title company. If you have a concern about the TITLE company fees you need to talk with the escrow officer.
They look reasonable to me. I don't know your neighborhood but I assume he is looking at doing a 50/50 split for other agents which means they would be getting less than 2%. you might look at what your competitors are paying to see if you are being realistic. Some times a bargain on a sales commission means little. If you save 2.1 % for no-sale there was no bargain.
In Oregon we split title and escrow fees 50/50 between buyer and seller. Those fees would be really high here, but I don't know about where you are. A home warranty is also negotiated in the contract.
Thank's for the replies. It just seemed that after they lowered the fee from 5% to 3.9%, they added other fees to bring it almost to the original 5%. This is Southern California, by the way.
Those look like pretty standard closing cost fees to me (though some have names that I don't recognize, I can figure out what costs they correlate to here). The seller has some closing costs, and the buyer has some closing costs, and during negotiations, sometimes one will agree to pay part of the other's closing costs. Or not, and both parties will pay their own.
But you (and the buyer) will each have some costs. That's what's reflected there - that's what everybody ELSE charges for the work they do, not what your agent (or the buyer's agent) is charging. Remember, there's the title company, the lender, the surveyor, the appraiser, the home warranty company, the insurance company, the state always gets its part, and so forth and so on.
If your Realtor fee is 3.9% then you will be paying $26,481 to your real estate brokerage. Those other fees do NOT go to your real estate brokerage but go to the title company. So if your agent had not lowered the fee then you would have paid $33,950 in brokerage commissions AND you would still have paid those fees on top of that. Does that make sense?
CA has high closing costs for sellers. I have had several CA buyers, and was always surprised by how high the fees were for sellers there.
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