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Comment by WXLCKNO | Hacker News Reader

The extra value is not there. Anyone can do this job, it's literally filling out boilerplate documents, you can ask gpt 4 vision to do it for you.

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I agree and disagree with this.

Contracts (which is what I assume you're talking about) are only "boilerplate" in fair-weather deals. But if literally anything goes wrong during the escrow period, then the wording of that contract suddenly becomes critical. When tens of thousands of dollars are at stake, I'd never rely on AI-generated output.

That being said, I also agree with you as for the value of agents, because they're the ones who write these contracts and to be honest, most of them are pretty stupid. We really need real estate lawyers to be drafting these things, not relying on templates. A good contract is worth a hefty fee.

why would i want a real estate agent to help me with a contract problem instead of a lawyer?

That's my point - I'm saying a real estate lawyer should be the ones handling these things, not agents. But by some kind of weird historical convention, agents are typically the ones that draft up the contracts, and they usually rely on a template.

The bizarre thing is that real estate lawyers are quite cheap since transactions are so standardized. I’ve always used one for home sales. The fee has always been between $500-650 regardless of the home price.

Agents must use a template approved by their broker (who has their own lawyers who drafted that contract, of course). Typically they can't do anything custom.

It varies by state. In IL both sides must have a lawyer. In IN everyone has the agent do boilerplate. I can say the IN way saved me a few thousand bucks…

There's a saying in M&A: if you're reading the contract you've already lost. For anything that is not open-and-shut (sure, sue the seller if they literally ran away with the earnest money), your specific wording is not going to be worth litigating.

Most offers in the US are truly boilerplate, the text being provided by an association of real estate agents, and the wording is not customizable. This of course does depend on your state.

Contracts aren't worth much more than the paper they're on if you're not willing to litigate, and there's precious few cases where you'd want to. Most of the time you should just resolve your dispute by blowing up the transaction. Speaking from experience and having hired the lawyers to originally draft things, you really have no other remedy if the other party really wants to breach.

Yeah I would replace AI in this case with a legal service which is more or less off the shelf. Although a lot of things can certainly go wrong in real estate deals, purchasing a residential home or condo is an extremely common scenario and I'd imagine almost everyone can use a similar contract (in their state at least).

It was worth it for me when buying cheap land. Since it's percentage based the amount was quite low; cheaper than a lawyer and I had a license to use the realtor association buyer contracts and connections to helpful people in the title office etc without having to hunt down and get these myself. When I calculate all the time I would have spent hunting down the right people, contracts etc it was a bargain against the buyer commission.

I wouldn't want to use a realtor for land worth more than 50k though. Use the percentage commission to work for you not against you.

Sounds like a business opportunity if I’ve ever heard one

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