[kbenson]

I think the problem here is not that they don't add value, but that since the value is tied to a percentage of cost, and cost has gone way up as a percentage of income, it no longer appears to be worth the value in many cases.

For a $100k home, it's fairly easy for the value added to surpass the amount paid. For a $500k home, the value added needs to be much higher. Then again, if you think of it as less value added and more like insurance (although unfortunately without a specific set of coverage), then what you're paying for is their ability to identify and prevent problems before they happen. Having a realtor notice items before calling in an inspector is useful. Having a realtor apply their knowledge of the market, and what people are generally looking for on both the buying and selling end when making suggestions for how to change the deal (such as requesting fixes prior to sale, or money back for the fixes) is useful. Does that usefulness surpass the cost they get in their fees? It probably depends on the specific deal, the cost of the houses being looked at, and the experience of the realtor. I doubt it's as black and white as being useless though.

[tigershark]

What is the problem with calling directly an inspector? I think they are more qualified than a realtor and I sincerely doubt that their fees is over $30k like the realtors depicted in this thread.

[JangoSteve]

I don't think there's a problem calling an inspector directly. But an inspector typically doesn't go out and find you houses to look at based on your preferences. They also don't typically negotiate with the sellers on your behalf and help you figure out an offering price based on comparisons. And they don't negotiate the contingencies in the purchasing contract.

And no, an inspector's fees aren't over $30k (of course I imagine this varies by state, but where I'm at, if your buying agent's fees were over $30k, that would mean the house you bought was over $1mil, since their fee is half of 6% of the selling price of the house, i.e. 3%). The inspectors we talked to were between $500 and $2,000 per inspection, depending on the level of inspection you wanted, if I'm remembering correctly.

And we looked at around 35 houses (which apparently is on the high side by about 10x based on discussions with our friends who have bought houses). So for us, if we called an inspector every time (assuming we could find an inspector whose schedule matched the appointment availability every time), it would have been around $17,500 on the low end to do that for every house, which is more than the buying agent's percentage.

Of course, we could just hire an inspector on the ones we liked, and it'd be much cheaper, but that means we'd have to look at it, then call an inspector and schedule a visit, which would add an additional several-day-waiting step to the process, which could lead to us missing out on the house, since it's not uncommon to lose a house to someone else getting an offer accepted first (that happened to us for two out of four houses we liked).

So, nothing wrong with calling an inspector directly, it's just a different job than what the realtor does.

[JangoSteve]

I think this is spot-on.