261–270 of 484 posts
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Yep. I was hired at a major hedge fund. Disclosed my interest in various companies ahead of time. Got to the hedge fund. Was told that I had to dissolve the interest. Quit job. Everyone pissed. I had other reasons to quit which had nothing to do with the job itself (I loved it), but that was a major one. I get paid more, per hour, from my businesses than any job I've had so far.
Out of interest, which types of companies did you own stakes in?
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That's fair. You can certainly make some big mistakes when buying/selling a house. E.g. neglect to have it inspected by due diligence deadline. I used a realtor (with a discounted fee) for my first house. Now I'm buying the second by owner, because I know how the circus operates.
If you get a lawyer for your house transactions, you will pay a flat fee of less than $1000 and still get the advice to always have it inspected.
Hire a flat-rate agent/broker. They'll technically be your agent, but you do all the leg work.
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Here in North Carolina the buyers realtor fees are entirely paid by the seller so there's really no reason not to get one. Ours was really helpful in getting things lined up and providing checklists and support when we had questions.
If the seller stands to pay your agent 3% of the sale proceeds, the seller will typically be happy to reduce the price by 3% if you don't have an agent. I just sold a condo in Minneapolis using a flat fee company -- fantastic experience and will never use a realtor again, save for maybe if looking internationally in a very unfamiliar area perhaps.
If you want an industry ripe for disruption, consumer real estate is HUGE. Got a couple start ups in my area trying to do that.
I work at a large law firm that represents a lot of software companies. Our standard employee agreement forms have the usual default (company owns everything you create with its resources or that relates to the scope of your employment). This default has always amused me because lawyers never sign these kinds of agreements with their own law firms . We spend most of our time writing contracts, memos, and other bits o…
The result is that contract forms have become a sort of IP-free zone. Exactly. One of the sleaziest tricks used by Realtors (most Realtors are not lawyers) is getting clients to sign their forms: their terms usually have the word "percent" hard-coded into the contract. Rather than opening the door to hourly or fixed dollar amounts, they insist that their forms are the "standard". I heard one recently say in a public…
In a perfect world, some wealthy doctor could just pick someone to invest in and do so, but in reality it's generally a network of 3-6 investors all putting a portion of they money into a deal, and the borrower has done this multiple times over the years as well. Coordinating that takes experience and contacts.
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I would have to disagree. Yes, much of what they do as far as finding houses can be done online these days, but there are many edge cases where a (good) realtor can save you. When I first purchased a home my credit history was.. interesting. The value the realtor provided was putting me in touch with the right grants, forms, etc and ways to build and fix my credit. They helped me not get scammed with a high interest…
not arguing against there being value, but there are credit rehab companies that would have probably cost you a lot less than the realtor's commission. Many basic credit consulting services are free. I bought a home recently and work in the mortgage industry. My opinion: the buyer's agent should be a flat negotiated fee, maybe an hourly rate. There is very little that most do that the buyer can't do themselves. If th…
For example let's say a selling agent is getting 6% on a house listed at $500k. If it sells at $500k he gets $30k, if it sells at $520k he gets $31k. If he were to get a $500k offer it probably isn't worth his time to put in a lot of extra effort to try to get that extra $1k, but to you that extra $19k is a lot of money. You might want to do another open house but the agent will convince you to just take the offer in hand. I think this is one of the reasons that agents use all these short deadlines and pressure tactics, it's not just to get the buyers locked in, they want to be in and out of each deal as quickly as possible so they can move on to the next deal.
Not sure how to fix that, but it is an issue to be aware of.
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> I've been trying for a long time to alter the common perception that Realtors add value; they don't. I've heard this before, but when we bought a house, our realtor added a ton of value. She went out and found houses that we wouldn't have found; sure, most of them came from MLS, but there were a few she found just by driving by or by asking fellow agents. She even triaged a couple for us (by going to look at them w…
all of that you either could have done yourself, or your inspector would have done for you. I don't begrudge anyone who wants to pay someone else to take a task off their hands, I do it all the time with various things like my lawn service, housekeeper, etc. But was the time they saved you worth the commission they made? When you're making 7% of the selling price, the answer to that seems likely to be no in many case…
Even if you disagree (and the answer would be different for everyone I imagine), it still doesn't indicate that the realtor brought _no_ value to the table, which was the statement I was responding to.
EDIT: Also, I should clarify, where I'm at it's 6% _total_, split 3% each between the buying and selling agent. So, on the other hand, was it worth it to the sellers to pay 3% to their selling agent, who screwed up pretty much every part of the process and didn't seem to do much from what we saw? Probably not.
EDIT 2: I'd probably realistically downgrade my "absolutely it was worth it" answer to, "eh, it was definitely worth something". If I had to put a value on what they brought to the table, it'd be hard to say, but maybe they were overpaid by ~30-50%. Again though, saying they didn't add _any_ value certainly wasn't the case for us.
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> I've been trying for a long time to alter the common perception that Realtors add value; they don't. I've heard this before, but when we bought a house, our realtor added a ton of value. She went out and found houses that we wouldn't have found; sure, most of them came from MLS, but there were a few she found just by driving by or by asking fellow agents. She even triaged a couple for us (by going to look at them w…
all of that you either could have done yourself, or your inspector would have done for you. I don't begrudge anyone who wants to pay someone else to take a task off their hands, I do it all the time with various things like my lawn service, housekeeper, etc. But was the time they saved you worth the commission they made? When you're making 7% of the selling price, the answer to that seems likely to be no in many case…
For a $100k home, it's fairly easy for the value added to surpass the amount paid. For a $500k home, the value added needs to be much higher. Then again, if you think of it as less value added and more like insurance (although unfortunately without a specific set of coverage), then what you're paying for is their ability to identify and prevent problems before they happen. Having a realtor notice items before calling in an inspector is useful. Having a realtor apply their knowledge of the market, and what people are generally looking for on both the buying and selling end when making suggestions for how to change the deal (such as requesting fixes prior to sale, or money back for the fixes) is useful. Does that usefulness surpass the cost they get in their fees? It probably depends on the specific deal, the cost of the houses being looked at, and the experience of the realtor. I doubt it's as black and white as being useless though.
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>I've been trying for a long time to alter the common perception that Realtors add value; they don't. I don't know anything about the law so I hire a lawyer I trust. I don't know anything about buying a house so I hire a realtor I trust.
The type and amount of training required for those two fields isn't even remotely similar.
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The type and amount of training required for those two fields isn't even remotely similar.
That is true. But the value added by a good realtor can produce as much value add to a transaction. I've talked to enough people who had bad realtors that I know they can literally be useless. But I've also worked with a buyer's agent who got 3% knocked off the price of the home I was buying. This is in the city of Boston, where most houses go for over asking, so I might have viewed this move as risky without my real…
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Here in North Carolina the buyers realtor fees are entirely paid by the seller so there's really no reason not to get one. Ours was really helpful in getting things lined up and providing checklists and support when we had questions.
If the seller stands to pay your agent 3% of the sale proceeds, the seller will typically be happy to reduce the price by 3% if you don't have an agent. I just sold a condo in Minneapolis using a flat fee company -- fantastic experience and will never use a realtor again, save for maybe if looking internationally in a very unfamiliar area perhaps.