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Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,563 posts, read 81,131,933 times
Reputation: 57767
If you were a realtor, would you want to give up such a lucrative deal? No, and they will not change as long as they can make so much. Here, for example, our house was $190k in 1993, the realtors split $11,400. If we were to sell it today with value $990,000 they would get $59,400, and with the current market it would take far less effort.
Q: Why are Realtors still reaping 6% for efforts ranging from heroic, to pedestrian, to basically very little?
A: Just because they can, Bubbeh, because they can. Thanks to ignorantly uninformed consumer inertia, customers who do not know, appreciate, or understand the difference between a lousy agent and a highly competent one; average and below average agents skate.
Sure, you can buy and sell a house without a Realtor and that's fine. Realtors get a commission only if they help their client buy or sell a property. I bought and sold my first home a few years before I was a Realtor. I gave up as a Realtor as I wasn't earning enough per year like most Realtors. Realtors have access to many tools, professional education and potential clients that the average consumer either has no access, desire or time to do so on their own. It is easy to think that they don't deserve the commission until you actually do the work yourself.
I'm a bit confused where you're getting "the government will get 18k" from. I've bought and sold about a dozen houses, and the only time the government got a cut was when I had a capital gain of over $250K on my house in San Francisco. (I'm single, so that's the limit as to my untaxable gain; if you're married, it's twice that.)
It looks like your gain would be well under the amount that triggers the cap gains tax. Is there some kind of large transaction tax in your state?
I bought a house the same month in the same county as my buddy four years back.
Crazy enough his $150k home sold for $250k, last week.
I just got a comparative market analysis and it shows that I should be able to sell my home for 600k, a home I spent $500k on four years ago.
His realtors get $15k, the govt gets 7k, and he gets 78k
My realtors will get 36k, the government will get 18k, and I’ll get just 46k
Taxes are taxes, I get that.
But the agents aren’t doing any more work for $36k than they would have done for $15k.
Why is this percentage based commission still a thing.
Did you really not know that there are about a thousand other threads asking the same thing?
I am not now, nor have I ever been a Realtor, so I have no stake in this, but it does get annoying when people ask the same question over and over and over again when they must KNOW that it's been asked before. OP, did you just want to grumble or take another dig at Realtors?
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,563 posts, read 81,131,933 times
Reputation: 57767
Quote:
Originally Posted by Grlzrl
You don't have to pay taxes on the first $250k in gain so that's not true.
That's $500k for a married couple, but right now our equity is at about $700k, so we're expecting to have a tax hit when we sell.
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