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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

The whole process is broken in the US. I was really rooting for a company like Redfin to come in and shake things up by treating it like it is for the vast majority of inventory, a commodity. Especially on the sellers side I feel like most of the process is the same. Clean the house up, maybe stage it, bring in your photographer and take pictures. List the property on MLS and then handle the offers/paperwork. Most homes are not $2mln showpieces that require a special touch, they are a commodity item.

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>Most homes are not $2mln showpieces that require a special touch, they are a commodity item.

But buyers do not treat the much cheaper homes as undifferentiated commodity items (like paperclips and crude oil) because each house is situationally different.

E.g. One house may be listed for $250k and is on a desirable corner lot but also needs a new roof and kitchen remodel. Another house is $280k and already has a new roof and updated kitchen appliances and is also 10 miles closer to the office to cut down commute times but costs +$30k more. The combination of tradeoffs (location, condition of home, price, etc) to be matched to each buyer's priorities is what makes homes -- even the low end homes -- resist becoming commodities like paperclips. In a box of paperclips, you can randomly pick any one and you don't care. Picking a house doesn't work like that.

Part of the real estate agent's job is to downplay the negatives and highlight the positives of each house they sell. I don't think that work is worth the 6% commission but regardless, houses are not commodities to the point where most buyers & sellers are comfortable with no intermediaries in the transaction.

IMHO, the biggest problem with the US housing transaction market is... home inspectors.

No other required party to a transaction has structural expertise, which by far dominates the cost of owning a home.

And their liability is typically limited to "what would be obvious without detailed inspection." Which is a pretty low bar for diligence.

Afaict, they're all ex-contractors who realized it was easier to fill forms than build (fair!).

But which is terrifying when you realize they're the only check against construction-ignorant people (read: the vast majority of home buyers) buying a nightmare property.

"What about building codes?" Well, you'd better hope the code inspector was doing his or her job the day your potential house was built. Flip a coin.

The mortgage company generally doesn't care, other than the inspection checkbox being checked, because if your home falls down you still owe the loan amount (albeit now unsecured).

Things I've had home inspectors flat out miss, that I caught with a tape measure and flashlight:

   - Undersized joist systems
   - Misframed houses
   - Serious termite damage

If you want a chuckle, ask a realtor what the appropriate joist size for a given span is. Hell, ask your next home inspector. (Hint: the table for common woods is a 5 minute web search away)

Home inspectors are usually optional, and almost always a waste of money... appraisers in my experience are also a waste of money, but banks (and bank regulations) do require those.

I have bought and sold several homes, and never used an inpector on either side. (I have seen inspections, and the homes that were inspected, which is how I come to yhe conclusion they are worthless.)

the whole point of the inspection is to go back to the seller and get the price lowered when the seller can almost see the check in their hands.

And, uh, pass on nightmare homes. It might not happen frequently, but it does happen.

"The laundry hamper was in the way of a thing I check and I don't move stuff."

"I'm an inspector and I dont warranty my work."

Agreed, and unfortunately you as the buyer don't have a good idea of who is a good inspector in your area. People don't buy homes enough. Sure there are google map reviews of inspectors but for such a large purchase thats still less than ideal.

A few years after buying a house, my family discovered the lights in the garage would flicker.

Turns out the wiring in the garage was held together with tape. No junction boxes, no wire nuts, literally just naked wires and tape.

Needless to say, the inspector found nothing.

The market has been so hot that any offer with a home inspection condition is usually thrown in the trash bin.

Maybe we just had a great inspector, but they found a ton of issues for us and were the cheapest part of the buying process. Compared to all the other mystery fees, I was happiest paying for the inspection.

Part of the problem is that their liability is typically limited to the cost of the inspection. There is not much recourse for a bad inspector or one who fails to find an issue.

FWIW this problem is not unique to the US market!

I probably did a poor job on my perspective. I see them as commodities in regards to the agent workflows. Sub $500k (picking a number) homes all have relatively the same workflow for agents, almost like buying/selling commodities. The parallel I would make is how Carmax treats cars closer to a commodity then a unique snowflake. They have a fairly good idea of the use price of a vehicle, there is no haggling, the sales person is there to facilitate the deal but is not the sole determining factor.

In my worldview homes below a price point are very similar. They are all different, condition, location, features etc, but generally you can get an idea of the potential price based on comps. There is still human touch here to get an idea on listing price but outside of that the workflow is pretty mundane and is just facilitating the process. Maybe in other housing markets its different but all the homes I have bought in the last 10 years, nobody was highlighting positives or downplaying negatives. My (buyers) agent shows me the property, lets me look around and does not really do much else.

But not all paperclips are the same and not all crude oil is the same either? We sort of pretend that they are for the purposes of price comparison.

And realtors do the same with houses. Have a home on the noisiest street in your neighborhood? NP, all the realtors will use comps that favor their preferred narrative anyway. Why would you get to pay less for that when that other house is available? Comp sheet doesn't say anything about traffic noise.

Rightly or wrongly, real estate largely gets treated like a commodity.

It is just a commodity where the cost of transactions have been highly optimized in the wrong direction.

This is exactly what I was getting at. Unless you are pricing a unique home in the $1+million (not considering NYC, SF and other expensive markets for this price) they really are a commodity for pricing purposes. Those boutique homes on the other hand have a very limited buyers market and there is much more marketing and presentation involved to create a narrative, both with the seller and the buyers agent.

Paperclips and Crude Oil value, relative to another paperclip or barrel of oil, can be based on well-defined, finite, measurable standards that can be measured indeterminate of their location. That allows pricing to be indexed based on location, time, and quality relative to the standards.

A house's value relative to another house is an almost infinite number of variations of measurable and immeasurable variables. One example-- Traffic noise. Maybe the amount of noise is an issue for you, maybe the time of day of noise is an issue for me, maybe noise in one room vs. another. Moreover, there are very expensive switching costs for me

But in the end it’s the buyer and only the buyer that sets the sale price. The listing agent can downplay all they want or “offer” whatever made up price they want but it’s all meaningless. The buyer committing to a given number, comes out of their head only, and is the only thing that sets the values in real estate. And agents can think they influence that number but it’s minimal at best.

A complete, fungible commodity. Except for size, location, appearance, appliances, insulation, water risk, lead risk, bugs, building codes, bathrooms, an endless list of amenities, a hefty weight of personal preference, HOAs, land, and that other negligible stuff off the top of my head.

For the purposes of pricing and workflows for buyer/sellers agents, the home is very much a commodity.

People are getting way more picky with the current home prices.

If a house costs 3x my yearly salary, I am much more willing to treat it like a commodity than if it costs 6-7x my yearly salary.

And if the RE agent is going to treat a higher price purchase as a commodity, I will make their life a living hell or find another one.

Homes are reduced to like-buckets at some point by necessity, but they are absolutely not treated like commodities.

If we did, you'd have to have a huge margin - something like 20-30%, or even more, to account for risk.

You're upset you pay like, 6-8% in fees now when selling your home? Well...

By that logic what isn’t a commodity?

Sorry if my line of communication is hard to understand. The selling/buying process can be standardized because for the bottom 90% of homes in a market they are no different from a workflow perspective. Yes, they are all "unique" but the process to buy and sell is exactly the same and they can be mostly treated as a commodity from that perspective.

In this scenario the upper 10% of homes by list price will not be treated as a commodity and probably need a more specific touch in the buying/selling process.

I hope by breaking it down for you its easier to consume.

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