Comment by sl1ck731 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sl1ck731 | Hacker News Reader

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We couldn't test the furnace due to the gas being off when the inspector came.

I didn't think anything of it since I didn't know anything about furnaces but my realtor put an extra contingency in to get another inspection of it paid for by the seller. The closing was within 30 days and they never got around to it in the week or two left after the first inspection, once I signed it was just forgotten. Maybe it was my job to get them on top of it, but he should have at the least brought it up near the signing to postpone it a day and enforce the contingency.

I ended up replacing it the next year. It wasn't terrible for me since I moved in with extra cash ready for such things, but could have been very bad for someone else who put everything into the down payment.

There were other things he was on top of though. He got the seller to come back and fix some wiring that the inspection had missed free of charge on my part which was fantastic. Not a safety issue, just usability. I didn't like what some of the switches controlled so I know they had no obligation to do it. The company who remodeled my house sells a lot of houses around here, so I suspect he has a rapport with them.

These seem like useful services, but the seller paid at least 3% of the home value towards them. Wouldn't you have rather just had that as cash instead?

I don't really follow the proposal. Are you saying that there should have been just their realtor and I keep the 3% I would have paid to have my own representative?

I don't expect their realtor to act in my best interest if so. Our goals aren't aligned. I almost fell into a situation where the realtor I was choosing was the buyers representative as well, which a family member who is a realtor as well as my bank advised was a terrible idea.

If you're proposing that realtors are just half price then I don't have a problem with paying less for things :)

No, what I mean is more straighforward. Let's say your signed offer is for $600k. Literally $18k is being set aside for your agent to point out these (IMO rather minor) things, and do some other pretty minor stuff, very akin to what a tax accountant might do during filing season.

What if you could just buy the house for $282k and never had to have an agent? Perhaps you would have missed these issues. Or more likely you would have Googled for a robust checklist of things to look for in an inspection, and discovered them yourself.

This is a structural reimagining of things could be.

I think it could work in certain scenarios. I just would not want to be alone for a major purpose were something to come up. Some years my taxes are super simple, some they are more difficult. When it's difficult I hire an accountant to do them. Same with a house, but there are a million little things that people might not realize they don't know about a house.

For example my house had a situation with taxes where I had to pay investor rated taxes for a year since it was held by an investor previously. That's the tax rate I see when I look at the MLS. I would have said no to the house if my realtor had not told me the way it worked, and that they would fall off the next year. I don't know that a generic list can capture that since its specific to my locale (or not, I don't know how it works in other places and that's great since I don't have to be an expert on it).

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