[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.