What Commission Did You Pay Your Realtor? (sale, houses)

[Carlingtonian]

Poll (anonymous of course) posted above. Please choose whichever option describes the commission you paid your listing agent on the sale of your last home, provided it was in Northern Virginia (NOT Maryland or DC). This should be helpful to a lot of people. Thanks.

And no, this is not intended to spark a tedious mutually-assured-destruction debate about realtor commissions. It's only intended to gather facts, whatever they may be.

Shoot. I left out the 5.75% option. If your answer is 5.75%, I guess you could state it in a comment. (Too bad I can't edit the poll like I can this comment.)

There goes my second career as a political pollster.

[ACWhite]

C, did you find a nice place?

I didn't vote because our house was bought a long time ago (in the bubble run up) so results aren't relevant.

[Carlingtonian]

Originally Posted by ACWhite

C, did you find a nice place?

I didn't vote because our house was bought a long time ago (in the bubble run up) so results aren't relevant.

Still looking!

I commend your electoral integrity; may you lose it come November, to vote early and often.

[FCNova]

6% on the house we're selling. We're buying a FSBO so that seller is getting off easy although we negotiated that into the purchase price to some extent.

[snowdenscold]

4.5%, (1.5 to him, 3 to other guy) but that is because we were buying and selling at the same time with the same realtor. They should be willing to give you a deal at that point. And then we got it down to 4.5% since the "buy" house cost 50% more than our "sell" house, and also because we did a ton of the work in finding our house (thru looking at tons of listings on Redfin and scouting neighborhoods / open houses on our own on the weekends). Even then it was very rare for him to go that low but I was insistent and he didn't want to fight since we were friends.

So for his "half" of the transactions, he made the full 3% on the bigger "buy" and took just 1.5% on the "sell". He preferred to discount the sell commission than to do any sort of rebate on our buy side.

So it was more of a 4.8% weighted average...

[smarterguy]

The house I just bought, the seller knocked the listing agent's commish down to 1.5% I think. My agent got their 3% I believe.

[sonnymarkjiz]

Didn't have a realtor. Bought new and just searched on my own.

[spencgr]

Originally Posted by sonnymarkjiz

Didn't have a realtor. Bought new and just searched on my own.

The seller pays the realtor fee, not the buyer. Did you negotiate down the price to compensate for them not paying the additional fee?

[Ffxdata]

Originally Posted by sonnymarkjiz

Didn't have a realtor. Bought new and just searched on my own.

Even if you buy new, generally the person at the model home office is an agent acting on your behalf. Was there no salesperson?

[Hal Roach]

last time I was making an offer in Nova, the realtor tried to ad a 295 dollar junk fee to the offer...he was fired on the spot. I've bought three homes elsewhere, since. Out of 8 sales; I've done three FSBOs.