Part of the problem is that your average homeowner is not only nuts, but doesn’t know what they want. Not to mention flaky real estate agents. I’ve got stories, boy howdy.
I’ve bought and sold quite a few houses, and have remodeled at least (carry the one multiple by twenty one, minus the twelve+thirty eight) shit, I’ve worked on at least 2,000 houses. At least. (Wow, I didn’t realize that. No wonder I am crazy!)
Now that I’ve established my bona fides, a good title company, mortgage guy and real estate agent does make all the difference in the world. Don’t pay more than you have to, but don’t just look at price.
Interview all of them, hard.
Be a good homeowner, it will make your life easier.
At the risk of sounding sexist, you might work out something with your spouse where just one of you does the talking.
My method is to sit silently and keep conversation to a minimum. I’m friendly but dont share personal information. Keep it all business. Oh… they hate that.
My wife, God Bless her, just cannot realize I’m doing a business angle and she will get chatting away with a realtor who just love to act like they are your new best friend and want to get you talking about your job, kids, hobbies, etc…
IME, my idea of what I can afford is greatly detached from the bank’s idea of what I can afford. My current mortgage payment is about 10% of my net household income. The bank believes I can afford more like 28% of my gross household income. We bought pretty near the bottom of the market and did really well for what we paid but if my realtor was able to convince me that I wanted or needed or deserved or was in love with a home costing 20 or 50 or 300% over my budget I could have called the bank and made it happen. I guess being housepoor is the American ideal.
YES. If you see a house you like, you DON’T have to call the agent on the sign. That’s the agent who is representing the seller. You certainly CAN buy through her, but you have another choice. Find your own realtor that you like and trust and make them your agent. Now you have someone representing YOUR interests in the negotiation process…someone who knows what they are doing and is willing to play hardball can save you a lot of money, and as mentioned above, it won’t cost you a dime because the seller pays the commission and it’s getting split between the agents.
Lots of people complain about realtors because they think they have to use the one who listed the house. A lot of the issues listed in this thread sound like people who didn’t find an agent to represent THEM through the entire process of looking, negotiating, closing, etc.
When I bought my first house the realtor I was working with got mad at me because I had my Dad come out and give his opinion on 2 houses, both of which I turned down on his opinion. The realtor questioned my maturity level and I told her I knew near nothing about homes so hell yes I wanted another opinion.
Each of the four houses I’ve bought were purchased at a substantial discount (10% to 30%) off the asking price. My first offer is calculated to be low enough to be nearly offensive but high enough to not be tossed out without a reply. Sure, $25K off of $90K is unlikely, but there can be extenuating circumstances where it still might happen. But $72K is well within range.
The last home we sold sat on the market for nearly 6 months. As soon as we lowered the price by 10% we got an offer; we heard they’d been waiting for the price to come down. Well sheesh, why didn’t they offer 10% lower 6 months ago? We’d have taken it and saved ourselves 6 months of payments, and they’d have been able to move in sooner. But a lot of people just don’t realize that prices are very negotiable. Heck, if they’d offered 25% less, that would have started negotiation, and who knows, it’s likely they’d have gotten the house for less than they paid.
The first realtor we dealt with when shopping for our first house was both. He kept showing us these dumps that didn’t have anything we told him we wanted, in locations we didn’t want, apparently on the belief that he could unload an otherwise un-sellable house on a naive pair of first-timers.
Then we were shown a house that was acceptable, except it had no major appliances and no landscaping, and the carpet was worn thru and needed replacement. So we reduced the ask by the amount it would take to remedy the defects, and told the realtor to offer that. He tried to tell us that nobody ever dickers on a house, and that it was always sold for the asking amount. I snickered under my breath and told him to try.
The owners refused the offer. The realtor called back and tried to get us to offer asking price, but the house wasn’t worth that much to us, so we didn’t budge.
Then he called a few days later to show us a house. I had learned enough to ask if the house had the things we said were important, and if it was in our price range. The answer to both was No, and we got another realtor.
Well, you have to remember realtors are salespeople. And if there is one thing I have learned in this world, salespeople like to hear themselves talk. Talky, talky, talky. When they’re so busy talking, they miss what you say.
I don’t have anything to add over what others have said, but do have an amusing story. A few years ago just before the housing bubble popped here, I bought a new home. It went well for the most part; I had a buyer’s agent and we worked with a title company as is normal for this region (who acts in lieu of an attorney). When the agent originally estimated the sale price including closing costs, she threw a dart at a distant wall on the property taxes. That’s a normal practice here also so I wasn’t worried, but I was aware that her tax estimate was wildly, wildly off.
So things bubble along until a few days before closing day. I request a more precise estimate of the closing costs from the title company and they decline to provide it saying that whatever my agent told me was fine. I request again and explain that the agent’s estimate was poor. They again refuse and reassure me that if my check for closing costs is too low, I’d need to write a personal check and it’s too high, they’ll cut ME a check for the difference. That’s standard procedure too, but I knew the difference was going to be pretty large. Actually I knew that the tax estimate was way low so they were going to end up cutting me a very large check. I couldn’t help grinding my teeth at their obstinancy because I like things to be right, but well, live and learn as they say.
At the closing table, when the title agent calculated the difference between the actual closing costs and my cashier’s check for such to see how much she’d have to refund me, her eyes bugged out. It was close to $1,500. You might want to listen to the client a little more closely next time, right biotch?
To avoid annoying the client the realtor might relay the offer with a wink, knowing full well it has no chance.
You can get a list of house listing prices and closing prices. That will tell if a cut is feasible. Around here $90k wouldn’t get you a dog house, but anyone thinking they could get that much of a price cut is totally delusional.
Hmm. I found that realtors tended to not push stale houses since buyers naturally wonder what is wrong. The house we live in now was stale because the owners put it on the market and then started renovating it. We got a great deal, and were happy because this was a good reason for it not selling, but it was hardly pushed on us.
Ugh. I love my wife dearly, but I had SUCH a hard time with this with her both when we bought and sold our house. She is incapable of keeping her feelings out of a major transaction like this. To me, it was a simple business negotiation. But she was losing sleep over every tiny little thing. When we sold, she cleaned that place until it looked like it had been built yesterday, and then apologized at the closing because she didn’t have time to patch up a few nail holes. She was genuinely concerned that they’d do the walkthrough and back out the day of closing because of that.
Worse, she knows when I’m trying to talk her down and doesn’t appreciate it.
It’s not that you need to be rude. It’s that you need to be direct. Speak up! If you ask directly, twice, and no answer is forthcoming, smile, say, “Okay then.”, stand up and leave.
House smells? You could leave this second? Speak up, be direct, “I won’t buy a house with this smell, I’m all done here!”
“Are you sure? It will only take a minute to see the rest, it’s quite nice. I think you’ll like it!”
Again, speak up, be direct! “No. Seriously, I’m done here. I won’t see more.”
If it’s not going this way, it’s because you’re letting him control the conversation. It’s not about you being overly polite, or risking appearing rude. It about not being direct -saying what you mean! Or not speaking up, when you know full well both how you feel and what you WANT to say!
When you fail to speak up. And fail to be direct, it’s on you, not on them, I think.
That depends entirely on the state of the local market. If it’s hot, list prices are often significantly lower than realistic in hopes of sparking a bidding war - Toronto was like that, when we were buying. Very frustrating, thinking you could get a house for (say) the list of 500K, only to find there are ten bids.
My sense is that the complaint here is that the Realtor is attempting to ‘hook’ a naive client - that is, get them to fall in love with a house outside their (sober) price range, in the hope that they ‘just gotta have it’ … mimimizing their sober second thoughts with the chimera that they can bargain the owners down to within their original price range.
I don’t really know about the lender part - just hanging up on the ones who won’t answer a simple question seems appropriate, or insisting that all communications be in writing might work, to save you time and frustration.
As for the agents? We used the same agent who rented us a house when we wanted to buy something, because we liked her style. Gave her our parameters - preferred budget, minimum size of property, needs to be in a certain school attendance zone, high speed internet access. (And truthfully, it was a tall order. But we had the advantage, because we were paying cash.) She sent us one perfect listing, we made an offer, the seller made a counter-offer, we required a current survey of the property, and we all met at the attorney’s office to exchange money for a deed. It really saved us a lot of leg work. Our agent shared half of the commission, and honestly, saved herself a lot of work by knowing exactly what we wanted, so that she didn’t spend a lot of time and gas showing us places that were only 75% of what we wanted.
I dont know about your area but around here the colleges got into the business of real estate licenses and than suddenly you have tons of these real estate agents running around trying to make a living. Often they are as young as 21 and never owned a home themselves.
I’m sorry but I want my real estate agent to be an old gray haired person (man or woman) who’s owned numerous homes and been a realtor for 20 or more years who knows alot about houses.
You never can tell what someone is willing to accept. Sometimes people get in circumstances that they just want to get out of, even if it means taking a loss. When my wife and I were house hunting, we found one that we liked that was listed for $160,000, and had been on the market for 5 weeks. We hired an independent realtor who was able to find out some information on the house and current owner. We found out his wife had passed away 3 months earlier, and he was desperate to sell so he could to move to Florida to live with his kids. We made a written offer of $95k. He didn’t accept, but he countered with $110k and all of the furniture included in the sell (worth approximately $8k) So, in our situation, using a realtor really paid off.
