Homie has seen good success.
I bought my last house through that.
First time buyers may need some help, but you learn a lot and quickly
I bought my last house through that.
First time buyers may need some help, but you learn a lot and quickly
Sellers Pricing: https://homie.com/pricing#buy-sell-tabs-first
Buyers Pricing: https://homie.com/pricing#buy-sell-tabs-second
The higher fee means they can actually pay for all the costs they incur and still remain profitable. Including the buyer agent fee means that they're in a position to attract non-Homie buyer agents to the platform, so they're not trying to bootstrap a market from scratch. It also means they can give half of that portion of the fee back to the buyer as an incentive to choose Homie, whereas in OP's model there's no reason for buyers to choose them.
Seems such a con. And your links imply it's built in to the system, there's always a 6% charge for that (otherwise why would they charge and give back half).
Short of multi-millionaires looking for an interesting fifth home without caring where it is, I don't see why you'd want to try to explain your requirements to someone else, have them sort of get it, show you things that aren't right for reasons you forgot to give or can't quite explain, and pay for the privilege.
In the UK we just find somewhere we like the look of, arrange viewing with the (sellers') estate agent, and potentially make an offer. What would a buyer's agent do for me except increase the price/decrease what I can afford?
(And I'm sure you could find someone to do that here if you wanted, especially for very high value properties, or by bespoke arrangement with some other real estate agent or salesman who's used to negotiating, but it's just not commonly done. I suppose for one thing you often end up paying more than the list price - and they might have to negotiate hard to get it for that, other times not at all. You'd need to somehow incentivise listing at a 'real' asking price (or penalise difference from it) I suppose.)
But the house-finding (and related apparent refusal to arrange viewing except through buying agent sometimes) and inversely aligned incentives seem strange to me.
Doing it a second time in a saner market, I would be more inclined to do it ourselves and negotiate a 3% discount on the house. But successfully buying a house at rock bottom interest rates was totally worth the cost.
But you don't have to hire them for that even if the seller is using them