Real Estate Agent Necessity

It is rare to see a buyers agent earning their 3% in the US. The amount of information and tools available to consumers is nearly in parity with agents. The more hands-on you are with the process, the less value the agents bring. They can still provide value in competitive markets or through complex deals, but your inspector and lawyer are the ones doing the real work.

Your agent takes a cut, you may be able to save more going alone if you are willing to do the legwork.

This article reads as if hiring a person to help broker a deal worth several hundred thousand dollars on something as intimate as a house is silly when it's not.I don't use a travel agent to buy a $250 plane ticket because I know exactly what I want and I know exactly what I'm getting and there's not a third party involved (there's no seller of the seat, just the airline.)The realtor isn't there because you don't have information, like a travel agent woul

Here's a dirty secret:You don't need a real estate agent, particularly a buy-side agent. Look at the housing markets in the UK and Australia. Buy-side agents have never existed there, and are a particularly odd quirk of the U.S. market. When you close the deal you typically have a banker there, and ideally a lawyer. So what does the agent actually do? Drive you around to houses you have already previewed online?Being a real estate agent is no different than being an investment ba

The way it works is : seller pay 5%-6% of commission to his agent. Seller agent then posts what the buyer agent will get. Buyer agent will get equal or more, as he to do more legwork.now interesting part:a buyer can negotiate with his agent to get some of the commission a buyer agent gets in range of 1.5%-2%. But buyer has to work with smaller agents, not affiliated with big firms : century 21. There is glut of agents, and you can get the deal. (me and some of my friends have)needless

In some countries realtors can claim that because you contacted them first about the property, that they get the comission on the property regardless if you continued to use their services or not. I guess this is to avoid situation where realtor connects the buyer with the seller only for them to decide to cut the realtor out and sell without the comission. This gives a big incentive to realtor to hide the location so you cannot contact the seller yourself, and they usually ask you to sign docum

I used what was termed a "transactional broker" when selling my previous home - I paid a flat fee of a few hundred bucks to them as the seller's agent, plus 3% to the buyer's agent. As the article mentioned, there's not much value driven by the selling agent - I managed all the showings via an app and we sold it in a week. The only real value to me as a seller is someone who can bring me a buyer (hence keeping that 3% commission). Buyer's agents also spend time taki

Human buyer agents wouldn't do these things that you're asking

From my experience a buyer doesn't pay if there's already a seller's agent. The standard contract is usually something like 6% is set aside for agents and is split among the buyer and seller's agent if each exist (you don't want the seller's agent representing your interests). Sure, if you and the buyer were comfortable and experienced enough you could go without (you may want a property lawyer instead to look over things). I've never met the other party when b

When I last bought a house, I had an agent to show me houses. Then when it came offer time, I actually had my lawyer do the final review and he essentially did the bulk of the negotiation, the agent was simply a mouth piece with access to the databases and someone the other agents would talk to. It was during the 2008 time and I placed a bid on a short sell, my lawyer gave me distinctly different advice than the agent did (a personal friend, no less) the seller made some demands that he