[ta1243]

US realtors seem crazy -- charging tens of thousands for doing what exactly?

The UK system is pretty bad, but you can choose to spend somewhere between about £1500 and £5000 to sell a £500k home, about about £1-2k to buy one (including conveyancing fees)

The US seems to be an order of magnitude more?

[mschuster91]

> US realtors seem crazy -- charging tens of thousands for doing what exactly?

It's not just the US. In Germany, it can be up to 7.14% of the purchase price (depends on the state [1])... so for a 750k unit you're looking at 53k of realtor fees alone, and anything between 3.5-6.5% of sales tax [2], 1.5% for title fees (notary + land register), and on top of that fees from the bank for the credit line... so for that unit you're paying at least 115k in taxes and fees alone. It's nuts, and yet people complain nobody is buying houses any more.

[1] https://www.immobilienscout24.de/wissen/verkaufen/maklerprov...

[2] https://www.finanztip.de/grunderwerbsteuer/

[FrustratedMonky]

Generally, they help with Sales, Marketing, Negotiating, Psychologist, Logistics, etc...

There are a lot of home owners that try to sell their home themselves. It can be done.

So if you don't want to pay a realtor, then don't use them.

Why complain about using a service you aren't being forced to use.

[a2tech]

The problem is that its hard to get your house listed on the MLS if you're not using a realtor (you need to use a digital realtor that lists on your behalf), and many realtors won't even show those houses to their customers if they recognize that its being listed by one of those digital realtors.

Realtors ARE a good idea. They should be helping you navigate a process that most people will only do once or twice in their life and is very complicated and full of pitfalls. However they've used their industry lobbying to carve out a very comfortable position and then stopped doing the thing everyone wanted them to do.

[ssimpson]

MLS also lists the rates the house is paying out. ie, the usual rate for selling a house is 6% and 1/2 goes to the selling agent and 1/2 goes to the buying agent. this is outside any kind of other fees you will pay such as closing costs, etc. If you list lower than like 5% on those rates or decide you don't want to pay the buying agent as much, they just wont show your house, even if its perfect for the client.

[FrustratedMonky]

Probably need to attack the services then.

MLS is a service company, and Realtors are a trademark group.

Perhaps they have what some might call monopoly on the market.

Technically, you can list your property without MLS or without using a trademarked 'Realtor'. There are other agents that aren't 'Realtor'.

It's like complaining that Google isn't listing your ads for free.

Just like Google owns search, so you have to pay them to get listed.

[ta1243]

Yes, we call them "Estate Agents" in the UK. Even the most expensive ones (with brick and mortar shop fronts) charge about 1.5%. Legal fees are typically fixed, and another 0.5% for the average house.

The US seem to charge an average 5.4% - over twice the price.

[gigatexal]

It can be done without a realtor but it's made harder by MLS and realtors to incentivize sellers to use realtors. There's no incentive to make it easy to sell a home. Just in the same way Intuit and other for-profit tax preparers lobby to make free filing of taxes difficult to accomplish.

Rent seekers and middle-men will always revert to their ways of bottom feeding.

[AnimalMuppet]

My cat sold my house once. OK, not exactly, but close.

We were planning on moving. My kids had "adopted" this outdoor cat, giving her food and (outdoor) shelter. We were moving in November, and I figured that cutting her off just as the weather turned would be rather hard on her. So I was trying to find a new home for her.

I ran into a neighbor that I had talked to maybe a total of five times. I asked him if he wanted a cat. He said, "No, but I want your house." He had wanted to buy our house when he moved into the neighborhood, but hadn't been able to afford it then.

So we did a private sale, without a realtor. That cat saved me about $20,000 in realtor fees, so I figured we could keep her.

So, yeah. You're not forced to use them. You can find a buyer (or seller) yourself. You can use Homie or something like it, at least in some places. I just normally don't have the time to do that kind of thing, so I normally use a realtor.

[bluGill]

The sellers agent does advertise in various places, including pictures for those ads and writing the ads. Those are arts worth paying for. How much they are worth paying is a valid question though.

[JKCalhoun]

6% being the going rate for realtors (split between buyer and seller) a £500K home would of course net £30k for the realtors involved (comes out of the seller's haul).

[joncrocks]

The difference being there aren't 'buying' and 'selling' real estate agents in the UK, just ones representing the sellers. A buyer just approaches a bunch of agents asking what is on their books (or looks on RightMove).

And 6%? Try ~1.5%

[ta1243]

And 1.5% is a ridiculously high amount for what they actually do. Strike will list you on rightmove for free, and do photos etc for about £800. Purplebricks in the £1k range (£1300?).