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Can anyone say Paul McCartney? Heather Mills! After his
1st wife died he married a very Wealthy woman and she only had 1 FREAKIN LEG!! After a few years she divorced him and kicked his ARSE with 2 legs! Like she did not have enough money already before she married him? WTF is wrong with those kind of people? I think he had to give her app $35 Million dollars plus lifelong alimony and all kinds of other BS. Of course why would he marry anyway in his situation? Not bad for dogging him in the press after they were married.
No doubt the sellers will lovingly pass on any savings to the buyers..just like they have always done? I guess that is why Sellers always come back and say we want the MOST MONEY we can get from this house..and create multiple offers and then say "bring your highest and Best offer" by this date and crete a bid war.
Oh yea, that will work real well.
Patrick
2013 Mar 24, 6:11am
Of course sellers want as much money as they can get for their house, but using an agent does not get you the best price on your house.
Here is proof from Freakonomics:
It is the quintessential blend of commerce and camaraderie: you hire a real-estate agent to sell your home. She sizes up its charms, snaps some pictures, sets the price, writes a seductive ad, shows the house aggressively, negotiates the offers, and sets the deal through to its end. Sure, it's a lot of work, but she's getting a nice cut. On the sale of a $300,000 house, a typical 6 percent agent fee yields $18,000. Eighteen thousand dollars, you say to yourself: that's a lot of money. But you also tell yourself that you could never have sold the house for $300,000 on your own. The agent knew how to ---what's the phrase she used?---"maximize the house's value." She got you top dollar, right? Right? ... A recent set of data covering the sale of nearly 100,000 houses in suburban Chicago shows that more than 3,000 of those houses were owned by the agents themselves. Before plunging into the data, it helps to ask a question: what is the real-estate agent's incentive when she is selling her own home? Simple: to make the best deal possible. Presumably this is also your incentive when you are selling your home. And so your incentive and the real-estate agent's incentive would seem to be nicely aligned. Her commission, after all, is based on the sale price. But as incentives go, commissions are tricky. First of all, a 6 percent real-estate commission is typically split between the seller's agent and the buyer's. Each agent then kicks back roughly half of her take to the agency. Which means that only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent's pocket. So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of $18,000 of commission is $4,500. Still not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives aren't aligned after all. (Especially when she's the one paying for the ads and doing all the work.) Is the agent willing to put out all the extra time, money, and energy for just $150? There's only one way to find out: measure the difference between the sales data for houses that belong to real-estate agents themselves and the houses they sold on behalf of clients. Using the data from the sales of those 100,000 Chicago homes, and controlling for any number of variables---location, age and quality of the house, aesthetics, whether or not the property was an investment, and so on---it turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house. When she sells her own house, an agent holds out for the best offer; when she sells yours, she encourages you to take the first decent offer that comes along. (My italics.)
You call that proof? Some obscure article from Chicago that talks in generalities? I don't know 1 agent today who encorages anyone to take the first offer that comes along? Every agent I know is marketing their properties over a 2-3 week minimum time before offers are looked at unless the SELLER is doing a scam short sale deal on their own house and selling it to a pre arranged buyer usually someone in thier famaily at a low price and they take control of the house at a later date. I recently listed a house I have for Sale in Oakland Ca with an agent that has sold some of my properties before. He listed it at $259k and did 3 open houses and set a day for offers, I received 6 offers and the highest offer received was $320k which I accepted. So my agent got me an extra $60k by not taking the first offer. The consumer is not stupid. If they thought they could get more $$ without an agent they would do it everywhere and it is just not happening. Whether you want to believe it or not in this High Tech, super computer era, internet savy peopl still go to a Broker to sale their property 90% plus of the time. WE have heard and seen on this site many times the argument for not using an agent but the argument does not hold water or the public would be doing it like they did other industries. I know you WISH you could make it happen bc you are anti agent and that is your choice. No one is forced to use a Broker but 90% or more choose to bc it is a proven method of success.You should have bought RE a few years ago when you were crying that the sky is falling and NEVER BUY RE..Renting is so MUCH Better?
Maybe it is better for you to rent but not for the majority o Americans who continue to buy.It is a choice. Live with your choice.
Think of money as male and houses as female. Then the real estate market is just like the dating scene, where, basically, the money is looking for good-looking houses and the houses are looking for a lot of money. Maybe there's more to it than that, but not much more in the real estate scene.
Good Program Patrick! This system bypasses the "pimp realtor"
Dan8267
2013 Mar 24, 12:40pm
Some obscure article from Chicago that talks in generalities?
This was on NPR within the last month.
« First « Previous Comments 41 - 46 of 46 Search these comments
Think of money as male and houses as female. Then the real estate market is just like the dating scene, where, basically, the money is looking for good-looking houses and the houses are looking for a lot of money. Maybe there's more to it than that, but not much more in the real estate scene.
So let's say we make a web page that lists money on the left, and houses on the right. So there are two columns on the page. (I currently have the left column created here already: http://patrick.net/housing/buyers.php )
Each house on the right has the exact address and maybe a thumbnail photo.
Buyers (the money) could then click on houses to indicate interest, and the houses would gain status by getting more buyers to click on them.
And buyers themselves would gain status by clicking on lots of houses, to show that they are not stuck on one house, but have lots of options.
Then sellers would have a motive to tell people how many interested buyers they have on Patrick.net, to show that their house is popular.
Could something like this work?
Maybe buyers really don't have any motive to indicate interest in a house in public, because that just raises the price for themselves. Or maybe they'd do it just to get attention and more sellers contacting them. What's the online equivalent of a man driving an expensive sports car to impress women?
Anything would be better than what we have now though, where realtors just make up fake numbers of bids ("OMG, there 2,323 bids on this house! No, I can't give you any proof, but you better take out a giant mortgage right away...")
Suggestions?
#housing