Does Jason really need a Realtor? He wants to be convinced

When I bought my house 10 years ago, my Realtor was a nice enough guy, but the stuff he found for me was clearly not what I'd been describing to him that I wanted. I found my house myself and my Realtor simply arranged for me to see it and presented my offer.

I still hear from him (I get periodic promotional flyers), but I'm really not sure I'd use him again if I were looking to sell or buy. I don't see that he added much value to my experience of buying my home. In other words, if I'd thought about it, I could have easily done it without him.

Now, my lawyers were another thing. Their help with some tricky issues about the closing was valuable, and I'm glad I didn't try that alone.

I completely agree with Jason and will freely admit that I am in a similar boat but not quite the same boat as I am looking to sell and buy.

On the sell side to a certain extent I can see the desire to use an agent to represent you for marketing purposes. And a good agent is worth their commission if they can market well. But you can also buy into the MLS for exposure, as well as having craig's list and zillow and other sites to advertise your home on if you go it on your own. If you have a lawyer to represent you it can work to your advantage. And if you list yourself you can still work with a buyer's agent if you are willing to work a fee or commission to the buyer's agent think of it as a finder's fee.

On the buy side I see less incentive for using an agent because I also find like Jason the "get me into properties" but after that their value diminishes. No offense to agents but all the paper work I am not trusting them to cover my butt in the legalities, they as a general rule are not lawyers so sure the agent can look at the P&S etc but that doesn't really give me a whole lot of confidence. I gave my agent my basic requirements (3 beds, 1.5 baths, towns etc) and they gave me a login to their website that provides that search to me. Great.... now I can do that same search on realtor.com and find the same info, and even some places that don't come up on their search glad the agent is doing some work for me. Then I have my list and addresses and guess what she tells us to do a drive by before she will take us into see a place more work on our end. I am waiting for her to provide me with any info on a house that I have not found in my own automated search......again her value is to get me into the house.

And too boot her pay day is based on what I pay for the place. Where is her incentive to negotiate hard for me? Her ethics....I am not a very trusting person so I find this hard to swallow. I would feel more confident if her pay day was known in advance she gets $X for getting us into a finalized sale and not based on the amount I pay to a seller. Again what is she providing me? The ability to get into the house to view it and she is negotiating for me but I am doing all the leg work to find the houses and drive by myself to check out the neighborhood, so is that really worth $3700 (roughly)? I am not convinced that it is.

I truly understand why a seller's agent would be based on commission...they share somewhat similar goals to obtain the highest sales price possible. And there is a lot of work involved in marketing a property. I have a lot of difficulty understanding a commission for the buyers agent...the goals seem a bit contradictory and the buyer it seems is doing a lot more of the leg work in today's environment. You could say well the seller is paying the buyer's agent but really both the buyer and seller are. Sure the seller is paying, lets just say a 3% commission but that is being split between the buying and selling agent (and possibly other splits as well but lets keep this simple) but that still comes out of the buyer's pocket it is just a matter of the buyer paying indirectly.

I believe a seller should pay their agent directly and only their agent. A buyer should pay their agent directly and only their agent and I think it should be fixed fee. A new system needs to emerge.

I agree 100%. Rona has already stated that if you feel this way, you never had a good Realtor, but sorry Rona, I disagree. I wouldn't want to pay thousands for a used car salesman to help me buy a car, and I wouldn't do it with a house either.

I basically did what Jason is suggesting. I had a friend who is a lawyer and also has his real estate license be my "realtor". I did all the work of finding houses I liked and then he set up the appointment to show me the house. As a lawyer, he then helped draw up all the paperwork and check everything I had to sign. We split his commission since we had split the work. We were looking to buy in the same neighborhood we had been renting in so there wasn't much he could add as far as navigating the area. It worked well for me and wasn't as scary as the "real estate cafe" method of paying by the hour.

One should avoid using a realtor whenever possible. Buy direct, for someone willing to put in the effort you can find your own house at a decent price, why pay a 4-6% load on any transaction?

The only moves I've made were company sponsored. They paid the realtors, etc. Even on our latest home search in our new town, I did a ton of research up front and knew what neighborhoods to target. I did the majority of the work. The realtor (paid for by the company) let us in the door. Past that, she did squat. Nada.

I wouldn't pay a realtor if we were making a move on our own. I'd hire a good attorney and do the grunt work myself.

Realtors are a dying breed. They can sell it all they want, but folks are doing the work on their own and don't want to pay realtors a commission for just showing up.

I won't use a realtor either. I just don't want anyone pushing me to buy or to look at things that don't interest me. I have used one before and at the time it was sort of helpful but if you know the area, are confident in what you are looking for, have a great RE attorney, and a decent head on your shoulders then you should be alright.

However, if you are one of those people that just feels better with some one holding your hand then go for it.. It is a lot of work looking for a house and some people do find a realtor helpful, it depends on each idividual.

I have bought and sold and rinsed and repeated, and I have encountered 5 agents in the process. All but 1 were useless. Far from giving good inside advice or smoothing the process, they made things worse and added a lot of unecessary drama. I think they do that to make you think you need them to "solve" the problems they created.

They would say things like "the first offer is always the best offer." Huh? Why? Based on what? No answer, and then the next offer was 40k higher, than you very much. Even in the paperwork department, they barely read things: one "professiona; r" called telling us that we had to give the seller $3000 based on the inspection, but she could not, over the course of a solid week, tell us what the buyer's inspection actually found. We never got a copy of the report, it came out in dribs and drabs of conversation ans she pressured us to give the $3000. She juste wnated the deal done. Another one changed our our closing date before presenting offer...to a very bad day that we were stuck with. They were also inept at the basics of how to get paperwork signed by parties in different places and we had to literally step in and outline drop off times or shuttle the paperwork around ourselves. One even had us drive the buyer of our condo to the train station for him!

The only one we liked was a no-nonsense guy who was a friend of a friend. He shot straight and added no drama. We used him or buying but since he was not local, could not use him to sell. (As a buyer in our town, one dominated by one brokerage, we repeatedly found that any property not listed by the brokerage was blacklisted, i.e. "Oh, you don't want to see that place, it has mold issues, termites, there is an HOA war going on, etc.." until the sign outside changed to theirs and suddenly "what a great property.")

I consider Realtors worse than used car salesmen since they are useless and self-serving and get paid a while lot more than the car salesmen. I truly hope the system changed and we can never use another Realtor. I don't trust them as far as I could throw them.

Pay should be tied to performance. Let's say the performance is based on # of days to find a buyer from the time it is listed.

0-30 days = 100% of the agreed commission
31-60 days - 80%
61-90 days - 60%
91+ days - 50% (at this point, they're probably not running around doing everything possible to sell the house anyway)

I think Jason may be missing the big picture here. What other semi-respectable job would midlife housewives do that their friends wouln't laugh at? It's about them Jason, not you. Pay that 5% because one day you will have a washed up, bored woman on your hands. Either she works as a Realtor or she makes it with the Real Estate King a la American Beauty.

- Teddy Pender Lady Bender

Jason is “stuck with his real estate agent”? Does his representation agreement state this? Does “his agent know how he feels? Loyalty, respect and trust is not one sided. During the interview process did they come to a mutual agreement of how they would handle his home search, negotiations, and purchase?

Consumer and real estate agency relationships are not all the same. Why would Jason choose this agent over other types of agents and then disrespect her by bad mouthing her? He choose her because? Does she get a chance to state here position?

Information whether internet based or otherwise is only as accurate as its origin.
GIGO (garbage in, garbage out.) Do people have different agendas?
No meeting of the minds = bad feelings. Who’s responsible for ensuring a meeting of the minds? The other guy?

Oh good lord-
My advice is: If you are buying a house on the MLS, the 5-6% is already slated to go to someone. If you don't use an agent, the seller's agent gets all the cash. It's your money....bend the rules of the 'system'
Do what we did. We found a buyer's agent that gave us a commission rebate so we got a hefty percentage of our commission money back. Under any other circumstances, we wouldn't have used one at all. But, since the seller's agent was about to get 5% of our $500k home, we figured we wanted in on some of our money too. They wouldn't have given any of it up had we come unrepresented. Had we found an entry only listing, we wouldn't have used the services of the buyer's agent. All he did was open the doors for us once we found the houses we wanted to view.

When we sell, we will be using an entry only listing- save ourselves some money.

Jason needs to decide what he really wants and discuss this openly with his buyer's agent. Jason should have done this up front. (When we were buying our condo, all I wanted were the listings - someone to set up showings when I told her what interested me - and some help with determining the property market value and a reasonable offer. She did this and I was pleased. Some store salespeople follow you around and are constantly bombarding you with information. I prefer to shop on my own, but I appreciate it when the sales person is there when I am ready to buy.

Jason, if you aren't satisfied with the service get a new realtor. If you feel that you can go it alone, then do it without the help of a realtor. But if you don't perform due diligence when choosing a realtor, don't blame the realtor for your dissatisfaction, and don't cry later if you make a mistake that a professional could have helped you avoid.

When I was 19 I got a real estate license to sell homes in CA, at the time I figured it was very simple to buy and sell homes especially considering the contracts are all boiler plate. At the time, I didn't really see the value I was able to offer buyers and seller aside from adding their listing to the MLS and holding open houses. I thought I was making a steal as a real estate agent.
HOWEVER, fast forward ten years later and here is what I have learned..
Now I am buying my own first home, & I even actually hired another real estate agent, a realtor, who actually knows what she is doing because she has even more experience, and here are a few things that an experienced Realtor can bring to the table.. so take it or leave it.
1. Experience with recommending other service providers - she actually brought a friend who was a contractor to help me get a better sense of cost of repairs for the fixer uppers I was looking at.
2. Experience with short sales. There are many agents out there that just do not know what they are doing in this area. And right now this is where the real deals are at..
3. Experience recommending other areas that I might not have considered looking in. - ie. neighborhood expert.
4. Also working with a Realtor, will help ensure that you are able to keep the deal together when problems arise out of contingencies and deadlines.
5. An experienced Realtor can also provide market guidance and make recommendations that you might not be aware of.
6. There's knowing what you know.. and not knowing what you dont know... and having a expert Realtor can help in the latter.

On the sell side... last time we sold our condo, I doubt anyone in the transaction did 6% worth of work (at that market in Chicago, that was the only way).

Now re. buy side, Rona was my buyers agent and though we did not end up buying, she was worth every penny of the retainer. What I paid Rona for was her intimate knowledge of almost every street, building, and the "opposing side". I know how to get any data I need. Getting into MLS, sale data, etc. is easy and cheap. Knowing little details about common problems with building of a particular year, build, style, materials, etc. - that is what I pay buyers broker for.
But you need to find the right one. I was always against realtors who help you buy and at the same time have listings. I only trust brokers on the buy side, different motivation, much less BS.

It's completely laughable when I read here that agents "only open doors".
Walk around for a day in my realtor shoes and see if you can handle it. I highly doubt it.

And it's like any other profession. One can choose to strive to be the best or one can choose to coast and just get by. Not all agents are the same.

As to commission vs pay by the hour, I say pay by the hour! Bring it!

We didn't use one for our recent purchase, and I'm glad for it. We wanted to move quickly when houses came on the market, and this was one less person who's schedule needed to be accomodated. The listing (i.e. seller's) realtor always showed us the properties.

The other thing to think about is that, unless you negotiate otherwise, the seller's realtor gets the entire ~5% fee, rather than splitting it w/ the buyer's agent. That makes your offer more attractive to the seller's agent than an equal offer from someone who has an agent. But... realtors would always act in the best interest of their clients... RIGHT?

I guess if you were married and wanting a divorce you might use your ex's attorney to save money? Most of the time your agent as a buyer is paid by Seller

I don't think anyone is saying that a Realtor couldn't add value to the purchase or sale of a home, but that many times - in the collective experience of those who posted here - they do not. I suspect this is especially true during a boom cycle where Realtors can make a pretty good living "opening doors." Now that things are more challenging in the field, I suspect only the really good ones, willing to do some creative work, will be in it for long.

The biggest myth and biggest fallacy in real estate is that people seem to think that the buyer’s agent is paid by the seller. Sorry to inform you, but the seller marks up the price of the house for the full 5% or 6% to cover the commission to be paid to the listing agent and/or to be split with the buyers agent. Where does that money come from? The buyer.

People split hairs and say it is the seller who pays the commission from the proceeds of the sale, but there is no sale until he sells his house to a buyer. This is the foundation of for sale by owners – FSBO. The seller is marking down the price of the home by the amount which would have been paid to a realtor and the buyer is getting the benefit of an overall reduced price. I’m not arguing for or against being a FSBO, only to point out who pays the total commission.

We all do the same if we were to sell any of our personal items. The same as a retail store does. We both incur selling costs, such as labor, advertising, commissions, etc and we mark up the item to make a profit to cover these costs. Who do you think brings their borrowed money to the table in order for the deal to close? The buyer! I believe this is one reason why there is so much hostility against realtors by both sellers and buyers, especially today when the price of a home is so high, so many people have had bad experience with realtors through the years, and real estate information is no longer held hostage by realtors as it was until only several years ago. More buyers would be able to buy a home and more sellers would be able to sell their home if commissions weren’t so high.

Many times homes will sit on the market and not sell is that the seller is held hostage by the commission amount factored into the price. The house might have sold, but that $50K or $100K commission is the 800 lb gorilla in the room. The seller can't budge and the buyer often can not stretch to come up with that amount for both sides to make a deal happen in these days of expensive and tight credit.