Comment by ohyes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohyes | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A good sellers agent with experience will stage your home for sale to get you the maximum possible sale price. For sale by owner is definitely an option, but it’s kind of similar to being your own lawyer.

A good buyers agent won’t pressure you into any purchase and may end up showing you at least a dozen homes and can give you advice on bidding / actual value of the home, and can identify issues with the house before you’ve bid.

The key is that they’re prioritizing the long term network effects of being well recommended. Our buyers agent was great and I’d recommend her in a heartbeat. She definitely saved us from a couple of potential disasters, and from overbidding (likely saved us low six figures all things considered).

But obviously there are a lot of agents that prioritize turnover rather than actually helping you. You definitely have to either judge them carefully or get a positive recommendation from someone trustworthy.

I agree that a good realtor can provide a lot of value. But the amounts of money involved are crazy. Much too high. The average sale-price for a house in my neighborhood is about 1.4M these days. At a standard 3% commission, that's $42k each for the buyer's realtor and the seller's realtor.

Yes, they both provide value. But $42k of value each? At that price, they only need to sell one house a month to have a $500k gross income. And they definitely aren't doing a month of fulltime labor to close my sale.

I think that $15k is probably fair for the amount of labor that a realtor provides. But the whole realtor system really is a huge predatory monopoly, and they are squeezing too much money out of the market. And now they're starting to get to the "find out" part.

They're not actually getting $42K out of that transaction as someone pointed out in another comment.

30% goes to the brokerage, 20% goes to taxes. Add NAR fees and team split, and the real estate agent is getting maybe 25-30% of the commission. So at the end of the day they are pocketing ~13K (versus 42K).

It is fair to ask whether the brokerage deserves their 30% cut.

The housing market is currently under supplied, and has been for ~ a decade, and while higher interest rates are showing some progress, it's still a sellers market.

In a sellers market, with competitive bids, over asking, and sometimes sight unseen / waiving inspection, (and in 90% of markets unfurnished) -- staging is the equivalent of lipstick -- and in correlation to this case, much less meaningful than realtors blacklisting FSBO/Redfin/Zillow listings.

Sounds like a professional service that doesn't have anything to do with sale price.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com