[jperras]

Canadian here. Sadly, it's common practice around these parts for buyer agents to completely ignore listings that don't have a selling agent attached; it's their form of industry protectionism.

As a result you end up losing out on a large surface area of buyers who rely on their buying agent to find properties, which puts you at a disadvantage.

[LeifCarrotson]

Are the buyers not getting a feed of every MLS listing in their target area?

That entirely solved our purchasing problem - we got automated daily or sometimes hourly emails parametrically filtered by school district, build date, price, square footage, and lot size whenever a new listing went up. It would have been stupid to have our agent filter them based on the deals that were better for him or his industry.

We had a uniquely good agent who spent hundreds of hours with us filtering hundreds of listings, visiting probably 60 different houses at all times of day over the course of a year before we finally bought, submitting a dozen offers, and helping us through the closing process, and then using his builder's license to help us ready the home we bought for move-in. He was extremely knowledgeable about all kinds of building inspection issues and the procedural minutiae. We happily paid him the 6%, it would have been far more costly to bring along an inspector/attorney/general contractor at an hourly rate.

[j45]

Canada is typically 7% commission on the first 100k and 3.5% on the balance.

As average prices have increased commission has also gone up.

Realtor fees are high for their low level of digital literacy and competency.

Realtors will be disrupted by tech folks who take a simple licensing exam and make software work for the customers.

Running anything more than a basic level of search is usually impossible for Realtors.

It’s this old realtor exchange which has more than had its clock tick past expiry.

A software dev buddy had some decent parameters (distance to school, work, family, etc) and it seemed to boil Realtors brains to find a way to map this.

It was more about making a sale.

It was almost to the point where my friend almost was going to become a realtor to get access to the data to run his own searches. He calculated getting a license was cheaper than the commission.

Realtors are like lawyers, too many don’t know everything but act like they do.

The ones who specialize and actually are experts are worth it.

Most sales are not that specialized

[lotsofpulp]

Websites have obviated the utility of a buyer’s agent “finding” houses for 90% of buyers.

Setup alerts for the type of house you want, draw the geographic boundaries on Zillow, and spend 2 minutes looking at the listing and maps to find out everything an agent would have been able to tell you.

[poulsbohemian]

> find out everything an agent would have been able to tell you

These websites are great and I'm glad the public has the information they have, but they don't tell the whole story - especially for someone coming from outside the market.

I'm thinking here of just the last few of my transactions - flood zone issues, title issues, broken sewer lines, pricing, emblements, water rights - like needing to cure in order to preserve, surveying, sub-division, zoning use, farm tax status. Plus finding all the professionals needed to support the process - I'm spending my day calling plumbers so that I can keep a deal together for buyer and seller, for example. I don't think the public appreciates what life was like before listing services - it's one of the major advantages for consumers that we have in this country over other places, IE: attempting to reduce information asymmetry.

[ZoomerCretin]

How can these services justify a large percentage of an asset with zero guarantees or clawbacks? You are seriously justifying all of that for a 6% of the most expensive asset anyone will ever buy? Why is it not a flat rate, i.e. $1-10k to sell a home?

[poulsbohemian]

Because:

A) If you want to work with a flat rate agent, go find one. Every property I have in my pipeline right now is on a different commission level, and only a couple of them are this magical "6%" the public loves to believe is "standard". Some of them are even fixed amounts.

B) It's only "6%" if the agent does both sides, otherwise it's whatever the agreed upon split might be - say 50/50, so you are only getting 3%. And, as a few astute observers in this thread have noted, the brokerage is going to further reduce what goes into the pocket of the agent themselves. I've had plenty of deals where my actual net was at or under 1% - I've even had deals where I lost money.

C) So if I sell a $10MM property that takes a year to sell and needs tens of thousands in marketing dollars to sell, I should accept only $10K in compensation?

D) Let's say you've got some shitty dilapidated house or scrub ground with zoning issues, maybe a barely inhabitable cabin somewhere. I find a buyer for it to get the monkey off your back. What's that worth to you, to have the pain gone? You think I don't deserve compensation for spending potentially months or even years to bring you a deal? When I sell properties like that, it is at best a break-even proposition for me, but someone has to step up and assist the public.

E) Everything I listed in my post is about risk management. I am assisting you with not buying a foot gun. In some cases, I am assisting you with buying an asset that will bring cash flow or other financial benefits. In other cases, I may be assisting you with getting a financial drain off your back. Perhaps not for you, but do you begin to see why these service do have value for many consumers?

It's normally about this point that someone in one of these threads says "but I'm taking about 'normal' deals!" Dude - anyone who has been in the real estate business for more than 5 minutes knows that the so-called "normal" deals that the public loves to talk about are maybe one deal a year for an active agent. They are the unicorns of the real estate world. Likewise, people in urban markets have likely no idea the variety of real estate transaction that happen in the world. At the moment I've got transactions in my pipeline for land development, commercial, leases, duplexes, not to mention basic residential work. And every single one of those have unique challenges.

[no_wizard]

I have routinely found more homes by looking around the neighborhoods I wanted to buy in than what I found on Zillow. They don't seem to capture all data sources well (or something else may be afoot, I'm not sure)

[lotsofpulp]

I presume their data source is MLS. Perhaps the homes you are finding are not listed in MLS?

[no_wizard]

Its possible, but I don't think thats the only thing, the reason being that they are listed via Realtors (usually) and I can sometimes find them on other websites (e.g. Redfin) or in the local real estate flyer booklet, but it simply isn't on Zillow for some reason.

I wish I had a recent example, but I tested this theory multiple times when I was house hunting, and I don't think I'm hallucinating the issue.

[cudgy]

The following video explains some of the possible discrepancy due to pocket listings not appearing in Zillow. It also suggested that realtor.com had more listings in its database in some neighborhoods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_emO4Dl8sUM&t=1740s

[yencabulator]

There are multiple MLSes and Zillow only has deals with most of them. It's possible you're in a region with prominent "local MLSes" that decided Zillow wasn't paying them enough for access.

[tverbeure]

Whenever we’ve bought a house, we told the agent to not bother sending us listings or set up viewings. We simply checked open houses on Redfin and Zillow ourselves, and if we liked a house, we’d ask the agent to prepare an offer, at a price we set. It is not to figure out what a house will sell for if there are enough other sales in that neighborhood.

For their reduced work, we’d ask a reduction of their commission.

[kube-system]

In the US, this will severely limit your options. Most houses are posted to MLS first, and don't make it to public sites until later. If you want to get the best deals, you gotta have an agent send you MLS listings daily, swoop in and make an offer on the first day before anyone else sees it.

When I bought my last house, my agent was able to send me dozens of listings from MLS for homes that weren't listed on public websites.

[tverbeure]

That was not our experience in California.

One of our agents would still send MLS postings to us. We usually got that email after we’d gotten the same email listing from Redfin. And not once was there an MLS listing that wasn’t listed on Redfin.

[poulsbohemian]

I'm curious about your location and whether your agent was engaged in pocket listings*. When I push new listings to the two MLSs I belong to, they syndicate to all the various sites almost instantaneously.

*Pocket listings are something more of the public should understand, as they are almost universally bad. Listing creates a market and gets your property in front of the most potential buyers.

[lostlogin]

Then this is why agents exist. That’s gate keeping to protect their patch.

[kube-system]

Definitely. But if you want to get a deal, for now, you have to play the game.

[dilyevsky]

You can pay a flat fee to put your house in mls without an agency - it’s couple hundred bucks

[kube-system]

Did you reply to the wrong comment? I am talking about buying a house.

[dixie_land]

A "selling" agent IS the buyer's agent, a "seller's" agent (listing agent) works for the seller.

That tells you how the agents view their job responsibilities, the buyers agent ultimately sells a house (to the buyer), the sellers agent advertises (lists) it.

[TexanFeller]

Not showing houses that don’t have a selling agent is a great reason for buyers to avoid having a buyer’s agent.

[bilsbie]

But if the buyers see your property on Zillow wouldn’t they insist on seeing it?