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Comment by Willish42 | Hacker News Reader

Dumb, uninformed question here, but are there not some sort of For Sale By Owner systems that cut into the huge percents in closing costs? Or is the issue that you have to pay the buyers' realtor fees too and that's unavoidable?

I'm trying to figure out why nobody's figured out "DIY MLS listing as a service without having to pay for a realtor". Maybe everyone who does this just gets a realtor's license or something.

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I sold a townhouse in DC using a company that listed in the MLS for a flat fee (I think it was about $200). I held my own open house and got my target price from a buyer I met there. He did have an agent but I told them I wasn’t paying any commission. The agent thought I didn’t know what I was doing and tried to sneak a commission onto the sales contract. Typical real estate agent behavior. (I had sold and bought a few houses before, using agents, so I was familiar with the process, and aware that the agents added no value.)

By what method did he try to sneak a commission in? What it something obscure that you have to know to look for or?

She just put it right there in the contract, despite our verbal agreement that it would not be there. When I objected she made a show of having made a “mistake”. Quite crude, in fact.

It’s surprising to me that the buyer’s agent would even consent to produce a contract that doesn’t pay them any fee.

I’m not a realtor but I considered selling my home myself once. Two issues I hit immediately:

1. I could not list the home in MLS as That system requires annual fees to use and you need to have a realtor license.

2. You still need to pay the purchasing side’s realtor otherwise they will simply not consider your home for their clients. That’s 3% that’s hard to get any lower.

I ended up negotiating my realtor’s selling fee down to 1.5% with the promise of using them for my purchase as well.

> 1. I could not list the home in MLS as That system requires annual fees to use and you need to have a realtor license.

Additionally, if you were to decide to list "For Sale by Owner" and market it yourself, you can submit it to the major aggregators (Zillow et al), but their contracts with the MLS systems often disallow them from mixing MLS and FSBO listings in the same search result set, so the FSBO listings are hidden behind a toggle or something and go unseen by the great majority of people browsing.

That seems like something the government should stop

aha, so THIS must be the real reason people like Redfin can make money off of giving you a "digital realtor" rather than FSBO uploads alongside the MLS listings. Makes sense, monopoly / oligopoly working as intended. I knew there had to be a reason :/

Thanks for your reply

Further blatant abuse of their monopoly.

Hmmm, sounds like a cartel that could be ripe for a bit of legal action. ;)

It's true that there's scope for an alternate MLS that's just for sale by owner listings. But as someone else mentioned, the buyer often uses an agent (I refuse to use the made-up word "realtor") and you'll have to pay that fee anyway. Unless, that is, your listings site provided handholding to do away with the buying agent. To handle the paperwork, a notary and/or a lawyer is necessary but the site could either provide those services for cheap or detailed instructions on how to proceed if you want to use your own notary/lawyer. It's simple enough. It turns out that the main function of a real estate agent is to simply ferry paperwork back and forth between the clients and the lawyers. You can just as easily do this yourself (we did and saved a lot).

> It's true that there's scope for an alternate MLS that's just for sale by owner listings. But as someone else mentioned, the buyer often uses an agent (I refuse to use the made-up word "realtor") and you'll have to pay that fee anyway.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this works.

With (often) the seller holding a lot of the cards, they could simply insist that any buyer pay their own agent, or buy elsewhere.

If the demand is even minimally high it wouldn't take a lot of sellers to cause people looking to buy to avoid signing on with an agent just to find a house.

It's almost entirely because entrenched interests (realtors, NAR) sabotage those efforts. The market has never had a chance to support any other approaches.

A lot of buyer's agents fastidiously avoid FSBO properties.

The first home I bought was FSBO—but I only found it because it was across the street from an agent-listed house!

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