Okay, the REALTOR thing is the most pretentious thing I’ve heard of in quite some time. If indeed you are “duty bound” to always present the word that way, then right here is the reason I could never be a REALTOR; it’s just an entire MINDSET I could never PULL OFF with a STRAIGHT FACE.
My completely anecdotal evidence:
First house bought: Great buyer’s agent (Realtor)
First house sold: No agents involved
Second house bought: No agents involved
Second house sold: Great seller’s agent (Realtor)
Third house bought: Buyer’s agent (Realtor) SUCKED. He was six kinds of awful: Didn’t listen to me, didn’t show me what I wanted to see, didn’t represent me well in negotiations (kept pressuring me to “just buy it” and not hold out for a lower price, so he could get his commission), treated me like I was stupid and didn’t know what I wanted. I was at a serious disadvantage in that I was completely new to the area (never been to the town before in my life, except for a one-day job interview) and had only three days to find a house before I had to fly home. If I hadn’t had such serious constraints of time and ignorance, I would have fired his ass.
So my experience is that there are good Realtors and bad Realtors – just like every other profession. I do think there is an inherent conflict of interest for a buyer’s agent when, as your agent, they should want to talk the price down as much as possible but, for themselves, a higher price yields a higher commission. But I don’t see any solution to that.
Oh, and windows with broken seals are obvious just by looking at them; you don’t need to be a home inspector to ferret them out. So if I sold a house with that sort of open and obvious defect and had priced the house accordingly, fuck no I wouldn’t replace all the windows after inspection. Now you can ask for anything – ask for a pony if you want – but that doesn’t mean you agent is wrong to tell you “they’ll never agree to that.”
So how does one go about finding a good Realtor, versus a bad one? My wife and I are planning to start looking to sell our current house and buy an upgrade in the next two weeks or so, and I have no idea how to identify someone who might know what they’re doing.
I would go for recommendations, if you can get them. If not, I suggest someone who has been in the business a while. As mentioned above, it is possible to screw customers and run off before the pigeons come home to roost. Someone with a track record should minimize that risk.
OK, I’m even more of a babe in the woods on this than that. I don’t have the faintest clue how one goes about even figuring out whether a given Realtor has a track record.
I’ve just started looking at buying a house since the market (finally) took a huge dive. There are actually affordable houses out there. So, I sent out a couple requests to view some houses. Only one realtor got back to me on my request. But, instead of acknowledging that I wanted to set up some time to look at the house he was selling, he just offered his services as a realtor to help me buy a house. It’s two weeks into the process and I think I’m going to have to hurt someone already.
I don’t want it to seem like I’m picking on you, personally, Annie, but I have to say that it’s the lack of knowledge about trademark law that makes people say things like this.
The trademark office’s database ignores the distinction between upper and lower case letters and records them all in all caps. This means that there is no legal distinction between “realtor” and “Realtor” and “REALTOR” and "ReAlToR"in trademark law.
The trademark owner has rights in the word as a mark; how it is capitalized in commercial use is a stylistic choice, and is completely unrelated to its trademark status.
Furthermore, as others in this thread have stated it’s stupid and pretentious to write an ordinary word like this in all caps all the time.
You might be “duty bound” to write REALTOR in official correspondence and marketing materials in the sense that your employer insists on it. But it’s ridiculous to say that you’re “duty bound” to do it for other, non-work-related uses, like writing in an Internet message board.
Oh I had that experience, I knew which building I wanted so I just followed up all the ads for 1BR units that were for sale at the time, everyone seemed confused as to why I was calling. What I found helpful is to call and tell whoever answers the phone that you want to speaker directly with the selling agent for this particular unit. It’s possible that the guy you talked to wasn’t even the actual agent, he was just someone from the office who saw a lead.
I picture this word flying around in a cartoon, Batman-style, with POW! and ZOWIE~!!! zooming all around it. I’m sorry but that’s just a funny way to write it.
I looked up realtor.com and they write REALTOR that way too. I don’t know how they can do it with a straight face. Their Web designers must laugh all day long.
It’s certainly a reasonable question. Fiduciary responsibility or not, economics come down on the side of a realtor screwing his or her client. A reference was made to the authors of Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner) above. As best as I can recall, they analyzed the process of the selling agent pricing a home. A broad example: You think that you can get $400k; that’s $24k for the agent (at 6%). They tell you you can realistically get $300k for your home ($18k for them). At first you think that they must know what they’re doing, because why would they want a lower commission? But the economics are that the house will move in a week at $300k, but will take three months at $400k. They’ve deferred a definite $18k for a possible additional $6k. Obviously these are exaggerated numbers, but the principle is the same; their personal goal is to move the property quickly. Their potential loss is only 6% of yours, and they will move on to another property to do it all over again.
I’m curious here. The OP refers to a realtor, but doesn’t mention whether it was the buyer’s agent or the seller’s agent. If the seller’s agent, then her doing whatever she can to get you to buy the house was her job. Resisting sweet talking and high-pressure techniques is your responsibility. Personally, she sounds like the person I’d want to sell my home. Although,
“They want the sales price to be higher, but they’re willing to pay closing costs. If you pay $465K, they’ll give you $15K toward closing costs. So you’re under your ceiling at $450K! How’s THAT for a negotiation?”
sure sounds to me like she wanted to raise the sales price to get a bigger commission. She’s now making her percentage on $465k instead of $450k, and that’s coming out of the seller’s pockets.
Yeah this is how you find a good Realtor. Around here, a lot of Realtors get business by advertising the hell out of themselves. I’ve gotten several post cards from a school friend’s mom with her pic on it, but I know for sure she has zero experience (granted, she has to start somewhere). I think a lot of people fall into this trap because no one knows where to start looking for a Realtor and go with whoever sends the most mail. And I do not blame those people one bit or think they’re stupid - advertising does work.
I found an awesome Realtor not by asking around but by the luck of knowing her most of my life (not a relative, a FOAF and eventually a Web design client). She’s a broker in charge of about 17 agents. She’ll tell you, and her secretary will tell you, that most of the agents are fly-by-night air heads. She didn’t really have much nice to say about agents when I talked to her.
She’s definitely more like what enderw24 describes (and is) - her entire career has been based on being honest, knowing her shit and getting referrals. She has a big party every year for all of her clients, past and present, so she stays on the tips of their tongues and gets her more business. I asked her if I’d be invited to the party that was a year after I’d bought through her and she said of course, as long as I was referring her I would always be her client. That sounded like good business to me.
FWIW, even my kickass take-no-prisoners Realtor told me when I was looking at my house the things that would not “fly” with the sellers and things they’d be willing to do. I don’t think that knowing the sellers would not fix your windows and not bother asking is a horrible thing for a Realtor to do. You do always have the option of walking away.
What exactly does one have to do to become a licensed real estate agent? I understand that you have to pass a test but is there anything else?
I think that if the barriers to entry are very low you’ll attract people who aren’t very competent who may eventually burn out because they don’t make enough but who can sour a lot of people on agents and the process.
Now that the market has become cutthroat, we should see a shakeout. The boom let a lot of incompetent people stay afloat, especially on the seller’s side. I can’t describe how many horror houses I visited which still sold pretty quickly. I see some of them for sale for much less now.
Another vote for “REALTOR” is about ten different kinds of retarded. My God.
In 1993, my (now ex-)wife and I decided that it was time to buy a house. At the time we were renting from a guy who owned shit loads of property in town. He was the best landlord I ever had, fair to a fault, but he was an exacting son of a bitch. I figured that if that guy had a realtor that he liked, they’d have to be stellar and I was right.
Christine was how every realtor should be. She met with me for about an hour and she told me that she had the perfect house for us but that the owner was a pain in the ass about meeting. She spent an entire day with me taking me to look at houses. Before we started she told me that some of the houses would be out of my price range and others not in the right area but she wanted to know my feelings on them to best gage my desires. We must have looked at twenty houses. None of them were quite right and I told her why about all of them. At the end of the day she was even more sure that the original house that she mentioned was the right one.
A couple of days later we went to that house. My wife and I both knew within minutes after seeing it that it was the perfect house. We loved it. To keep this short I won’t go into details but it was a very difficult negotiation. The owner had to sell but was very reluctant to do so and his realtor was an unethical piece of shit. Christine talked to me two to three times a day keeping me updated on the progress. She was amazing.
At the end, we were just a hair away from making the deal and we didn’t have even one more cent to give away. We were young at the time and were really stretching to make it. Christine and I had really hit it off and she wanted to make our home dream come true so she cut her commission to make it work for us.
Her good work paid major dividends because we’ve since referred her to several people and some of them have referred her to others. She’s made dozens of extra sales (including to my ex-wife when she moved out and bought her own place) because of how she treated us.
The problem with the business is a structural one: a buyer’s agent has no incentive to work hard to get the lowest price for a house, or to look for a modest house withing budget, as their commission is based on a percentage of the fee.
On the other hand … if you are willing to be reasonably tough about what you want and how much you want to spend, this can also work for you, as they do not get paid by the hour.
When I was buying a house a couple of years ago, it was a hot seller’s market (still is, here in Toronto). That meant lots of auctions and lots of pressure. It took us over a year to find a place as we kept within budget and refused to bid outrageous amounts in auctions - we kept making quite reasonable bids (and kept getting creamed). Throughout this process, our agent was working for us seemingly non-stop – finding us places, representing us at auctions, driving us around to view houses. It was well worth her while as we did eventually buy a house and she got her share of commission (3% minus whatever the office takes and expenses - not a meagre sum!) but she certainly had to work for it - we must have seen fifty places or more before we bought.
I was very pleased with her service and I think she earned her money, moreso in the case of a really hot market were houses were being snapped up fast.
From the sellers viewpoint realtors can be against your interests… If you are selling your house for 200 thou . They get 6000 bucks. Drop your price 10 grand and they get 5700. Easier sell. Drop another and a very easy sell. They can move a lot of houses by getting sellers to go low. Their incentive is to move properties, not get the largest price possible.
When I talked to my 3rd agent I made it clear what we were looking at and I had no intension of giving it away to make his job easier. We did well after that although I went against his last minute advice to drop another 5 k.
She was a Buyer’s Agent (we signed the agreement).
Do you see the fast one she pulled? (I might be wrong, but I think you fell for it too).
It’s actually $465K + closing costs (~$13500) equaling about $478.5K. If I were paying the closing costs, this is what I’d pay. So the sellers were to pay it, I’m STILL paying $465K, which is $15K over my ceiling. The sellers would net $450K, but that doesn’t mean anything to me.
In fact one of the best REALTORS in the business once taught me that they should Always Be Closing. He worked this into some kind of slogan but I forget how it went. This was just after the jerk told me I couldn’t have any coffee since I’m not a closer :mad:
