Realtors Face an Antitrust Reckoning
Another discussion on HN about realtors that is full of people thinking agents do nothing but skim off the top. Particularly ironic for a group a of people who talk so much about how much their time is worth.<p>Yes, if your time is worth $0 then maybe a realtor isn&#x27;t worth it but even then I disagree. If you go the FISBO route then you should know that other agents &#x2F;hate&#x2F; working with you. Not because of anything relating to money but relating to competence. If they work with a real agent (and not a 1-2 houses a year, &quot;I got my license on the weekends but it&#x27;s a part-time job&quot;, agent), especially one they have worked with before, they know they aren&#x27;t going to have to hold the other person&#x27;s hand every step of the way. That or deal with gross incompetence in writing&#x2F;submitting&#x2F;etc documents.<p>My parents are real estate agents and I&#x27;ve heard them talk about (and seen firsthand) the pain of dealing with bad agents and it gets 10x worse dealing with someone who is not an agent. They make mistakes constantly, my parents have to do way more work since the other party doesn&#x27;t know what they are doing, and it&#x27;s frustrating for the buyer&#x2F;seller they are representing as well.<p>Let me put this in terms more of you will understand: You know how the low paying clients are always the biggest headache? They want the moon but want to pay pennies for your work? Yep, that&#x27;s what&#x27;s it like working with someone who is not an agent (or is a bad one). See also &quot;cheaper&quot; agents, you get what you pay for.<p>Furthermore real estate can get very emotional. Maybe you built the house (aka, paid for it to be build and picked all the finishings&#x2F;etc), maybe you remodeled it all, maybe you&#x27;ve just lived there for 10+ years and it&#x27;s &quot;home&quot;, maybe one of the spouses doesn&#x27;t want to sell and is going to dig their heels in, maybe neither spouse wants to downsize but are being forced to since they can&#x27;t justify the bigger house after all the kids have left, maybe medical bills are forcing them to sell, and the list goes on. In situations like this I _promise_ you that you want an intermediate. You also want someone that can do a little &quot;backchanneling&quot; to see where the other party is, are they just on the edge of accepting the offer? Are you way off in left field? Would they be fine with the offer if you waive your right to remedy?All of these things are made way better by having someone who does this day in and day out in your corner and does not have an emotional attachment to the house. Even with an agent I&#x27;ve seen deals on $1M+ houses fall through over &lt;$5K because someone felt like they didn&#x27;t &quot;win&quot; the negotiating, I&#x27;ve seen even more deals go through because my parents could smooth things over with the other agent and&#x2F;or calm down their clients.<p>That brings us to the article talking about how real estate agents:<p>&gt; That means there’s little incentive for buyer brokers to negotiate better deals for clients, especially since they earn bigger commissions on higher-priced homes.<p>Are there unscrupulous, fly-by-night, agents out there? Of course, I challenge you to find any industry without these kinds of vultures, programming is no exception. But you have to understand that if you want to be a successful, long-term real estate agent then you are slitting your throat with this move. The _vast_ majority of your business is going to come from repeat and referral business. That&#x27;s friends&#x2F;family of your clients or the same clients again when they want to move 3, 5, 10 years down the line. Just within my friend group we all used the same agent over the span of over a decade since she was great to work with and we liked her (I don&#x27;t live near my parents or I would have used them). This is where the money is. You don&#x27;t get repeat business from people you piss off, from people you put in a house outside what they can afford, etc.<p>Lastly, not only do real estate agents know the market&#x2F;area better than you (again, excluding scummy&#x2F;bad agents) and can warn you of things not readily apparent about a house you are interested in but they can have a huge impact on how much your house sells for. They bring in a stager (if they are good agents) to tell you what you should move&#x2F;remove&#x2F;change to help your house sell, they can recommend easy&#x2F;cheap things you can do to improve the value, and all around they know what people are looking for better than you do. Trust me, you are too emotional about your house to make the right decisions when it comes to things like this. I don&#x27;t care that you like the couch there or that you don&#x27;t don&#x27;t use the dining room as a dining room, buyers _do_ care and it can be a turn off. Things like this are very difficult to do on your own and we haven&#x27;t even gotten into taking good pictures.<p>I&#x27;m going to stop here but I always just laugh at people that want something like Redfin or Zillow to succeed here. 6% is worth it IMHO and as someone who worked for my parents and probably could have bought my house on my own (or with their remote help) I was all too happy to pay an agent to do it, I&#x27;ve seen the work a good agent puts in firsthand and I have no desire to take on a second job.