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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

The seller's agents are indeed salesman but their incentives don't end up quite aligned with the seller's.

For example let's say a selling agent is getting 6% on a house listed at $500k. If it sells at $500k he gets $30k, if it sells at $520k he gets $31k. If he were to get a $500k offer it probably isn't worth his time to put in a lot of extra effort to try to get that extra $1k, but to you that extra $19k is a lot of money. You might want to do another open house but the agent will convince you to just take the offer in hand. I think this is one of the reasons that agents use all these short deadlines and pressure tactics, it's not just to get the buyers locked in, they want to be in and out of each deal as quickly as possible so they can move on to the next deal.

Not sure how to fix that, but it is an issue to be aware of.

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I wanted to do this the last time I sold a house -- I was thinking something like, the commission should be 1/3 of the difference between the sale price and an agreed-on minimum price. Stupidly, I didn't stick to it when the first agent I started talking to told me she wasn't empowered to negotiate such terms.

That agent was very helpful in a lot of ways, but didn't get me a particularly good price -- another, nearly identical unit in the same condo complex sold around the same time for about $30k more.

I think the next time, I will stick to my guns on the terms. That probably means I'll have to find an independent agent. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I think the agent who sold that other unit in my complex was independent.

I can only agree. Having had to sell a home via a realtor recently due to distance my (totally anecdotal) experience was that his incentive was to find anyone who would bid at least some amount within my price range. Not the best deal. He didn't exactly market it. And after signing all paperwork and visiting the house with the new owners I realized what positive aspects of the house were all unknown to them.

Lots of things like that. And then both parties having to pay 5.1k for his 'service'.

One minor nit. The selling agent doesn't get 30K. They get 15K because the buyer's agent also gets 15K in most normal deals. From that 15K their firm probably takes somewhere between 30-50% depending on the volume and size of deals they close. I'm not saying they're worth 7-10K but it's a far cry from the 30K you speak of. Which reinforces your point even more. They don't get compensated enough to spend another few weeks trying to get you 20K more.

The authors of Freakonomics wrote a whole chapter along these lines about realtor distinctives.

disincentives (autocorrect)

Not only that, but if your neighbor has a 800k house to sell, guess what house your agent is hiding from their clients so it can get a better commission.

I built a website for a realtor, and she specifically wanted that functionality.

It really pisses me off that in this day and age they think they can be "gatekeepers" of the information.

And they provide an extremely shitty service, they don't even take the care to take good photos of the property.

They've long lobbied for more regulation in my country and are extremely angry that most people are not using their services (I wonder why... :) ).

They did manage to make their services mandatory for state-owned mortgages :( .

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