If you have so much contempt for agents & feel they are useless, then why are you using one?
I get several thousand back from my mortgage company for using one of their recommended agents for my shopping pleasure. I will need an agent for brokering the deal anyway so I figured what the fuck?
You ever try shopping for a house from across the country when both you and your wife work full time? You’re lucky to hear back from a selling agent 1 out of 10 times times when you try to personally contact them for anything other than “I want to see this house take me there”. They don’t want to deal with people that aren’t already interested in the property.
If you buy a house directly from an agent, with that agent acting as the buying and selling agent, don’t they get 6% instead of 3%? You’d think they’d be more interested in dealing directly with me but they fuck around and waste time instead.
And the fact that there are 1 million of these fucking leeches out there means that almost every house I want info on has a different agent. So you have to go through making contact for each house you want info on which takes time I don’t have.
Worst law ever.
I was told it was because they can be sued if they’re off by even one foot, so they won’t say anything. I disbelieve that myself.
Feel free to let me know how you would plan a 2 day tour of 30 houses in DC without a real estate agent helping you.
I would call BS on that, as well. I heard of a lawsuit that was filed many years ago wherein a buyer successfully sued an agent due to the fact that the purchase price was based at least partly on square footage. The area given by the agent was found to be incorrect after the sale was completed, or something to that effect.
I’m still trying to find some concrete evidence.
Cubsfan, I misread your OP and thought you were looking in Ohio. Since you’re looking in the D.C. area you can use Redfin to do your own research. One of the nice things about it is that it not only shows all the basic stuff, but also competing properties, days on the market, comparable sold properties and how many times the home has been listed. Often, very revealing.
I think I explained that already. Besides, her only help so far has been doing nothing other than emailing us listings. We’ll see how much help she gives us while we are out there.
If you have a contract with a buyers’ agent, you should get her to do some work for her commission. I would tell her to go visit the houses you are most interested in with a digital camera and a tape measure before your visit and make up a nice package for you of the best 30 homes, including all the stats you want and pictures. Let her earn her commission in this market. My Realtor prescreened a lot before I went to visit properties.
We are so lucky, we go tthe absolute best agent to show us houses, answer questions, send us listings. Plus, he was a former cop so he knew tons about each neighborhood. We saw a house we loved and he convinced me to offer less than what I suggested, then he got them to accept. The appraisal came in at $31,000 above what we are paying (well it came in $18,000, but we are also getting $12,450 toward closing costs from the seller and yes I know the appraisal is just that an appraisal). Close is less than two weeks away.
GO and wife are very excited.
I didn’t actually see a plan, so much as a statement that you’d be seeing 30 homes in a 2 day whirlwind tour.
If you expect to see 30 homes in 2 days, she’s going to have to be a lot of help, and she will be spending a lot of time with you to get the job done, and a fair amount of time getting all the visits arranged.
I don’t want this to turn into an agent bashing thread because we just had one of those, and I really don’t have anything to bash my current agent over. BUT,…
I’m buying a $400K home. She stands to make 10-12K off of this. Even if she had to spend the full 48 hours with us holding our hands and wiping our asses(which she is not, her partner is going to be with us on the second day) that is still not $12K worth of work.
I’ve never understood what the value of a house has to do with proper compensation for an agent. You’re telling me that they do more work on a $300K house than they do on a $150K house? And before you start comparing them to car salesmen or other commission type jobs there is a difference. The difference is that in real estate they are playing with other peoples money. They are helping to sell a house that someone else owns, not the realtor themselves. They are making large amounts of money with virtually ZERO risk to themselves and 100% risk to the seller/buyer. It’s not like car lots where the dealership or manufacturer owns the vehicles and they are paying their salesmen a commission or SPIF or whatever. That is coming from the company profits. In real estate the more they sell your house for, the more you owe them in commission up to a ridiculous amount of money.
Commission based pay structures have no place in high-dollar, consumer backed (consumers put up both the product and the purchase cash) sales environments.
Congratulations! 
We had a great buyers agent as well, and her service was invaluable.
No, but it’s not about that. Risk/venture compensation isn’t figured the same way as factory labor. It’s based on how difficult (or easy) money is to come by, and how much risk must be invested for how much return. A commissioned salesman is paid the same way. He can go the easier route and sell lots of fast moving commodities, or he can try to hit the jackpot by selling the top-of-the-line high-dollar item. In all cases, the sales person is being paid from profits earned by the company which itself took risks. (Imagine putting your own money out there, having no way to take it back, and depending on someone else to increase it for you. You could lose it all.)
If you can’t see the reasoning behind paying a commission based on a percentage of the sales price, then you need to think about it a little harder. The idea is that a good agent will consequently save you a certain percentage of money as a result of the experience they have. If you don’t think they are worth $12K, then don’t use one & see how much money you can save.
That sounds like a direct parallel to me. The owner of the house/car hires a professional salesman/agent to get the best sale price for it. And, to provide a direct incentive for the salesman/agent to get a better price, the salesman/agent is given a proportional stake in the final price.
I’m not sure where you get the idea that an agent or salesman has 0 risk, either. Their risk is the opportunity cost of their work going to waste without a sale. All the work they do is before they get paid. If they don’t come through with a sale, they get $0 for any effort made.
That’s one of the things you’re paying for if you use a buyer’s agent.
Exactly what else do you want her to do at this point? She can’t be arranging tours of the houses for you, since you’re not there. It’s not a great idea to arrange tours well ahead of time, since some of the houses might sell out from under you (we had that happen a few times last year) and leave you with dead time in your schedule when you do visit- the list of houses you plan to visit might change enough by the time you actually visit as to make arranging visits now a waste of time. You’re not ready to make an offer, so she can’t be doing any of the paperwork or other stuff associated with that.
In my view, real estate agents are lower forms of life than Car Salesmen. With a car, you are in it for a few years and if you got screwed it isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. With a house, you are screwed for life.
They lie, cheat, and outright steal, and make oodles of money for doing almost nothing. Look, Dropout McBlazer, I am glad you passed your little test and proved you know the difference between Colonial French and Spanish Revival, and the difference between R1 and R3. Congratulations! How in the world this paltry knowledge justifies your making thirty grand on a sale you spend a few hours on is beyond me.
The reason online listings are so sparse is they want you to have to come in and talk to them. The minute you say “hi” to them, the entire commission is theirs should you buy the property. Under their “code” (industry practices designed to screw the customer) You have given up your right to have an independent negotiator on your side. Interestingly CAR DEALERS do the exact same thing. Car ads are intentionally written to exclude key details so you must come in and swim in the shark pool.
Hahahaha. The agent has a conflict of interest. They are representing the seller and their own commission. It is in their interest to sell you the house for as much as possible. And you MUST use an agent to buy 99% of the property out there, because they are LISTED WITH AGENTS. Trying to find a suitable property that is “For Sale by Owner” is an almost impossible task. The industry has convinced sellers that selling their own home is impossible, spending millions of dollars on complete bs “feel good” advertisements to convince you of this.
Plus, they are morons. I have never met a real-estate agent that I felt could pass a GED exam. There is a reason they are hustling in a job that requires zero brainpower or ability, and lots of guile. Screw them all with a rusty chainsaw. They are nothing but leeches.
/currently trying to buy some land
Don’t forget about county tax records. Here’s Fairfax County: Fairfax County - Home Page
I think all of Virginia’s counties have online tax record interfaces. They are not as detailed or user-friendly as (some of) the ones in the West, but they may offer some helpful clues.
My wife and I are also looking for houses in the Manassas area. Mostly Bristow and Haymarket. But we live here and are taking our time so we don;t feel rushed. We sold our townhouse last year and are sitting on our profit waiting for the prices to keep dropping. The OP is correct in that there are a TON of houses on the market and the prices keep falling what with all the foreclosures.
We have an agent helping us. The same guy that helped us sell our house (got us our asking price, pretty top dollar–we had a contract within weeks of listing). He sends us the listing reports every couple of weeks and then my wife and I do drive-bys and then let him know which ones “make the cut” for a showing.
Anyway, my wife is totally tied into square footage. Me? I don’t even look at the total–just the rundown on the bedrooms and living space. The reason, is that I don’t trust the number. I swear if you had 10 different listings of the same house by 10 different sellers/agents, you’d have 10 different totals. I think some people just measure the outer dimensions and calculate it from that. Some include the “walk-out” basement; some skip everything that is even a bit below grade. And like alluded to upthread, 3500 sq. ft. laid out well is better than 4000 poorly designed sq. ft.
Who knew ignorance could be so damn funny?