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…
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 without us once she had gotten a sense for what our common feedback patterns were, and only making us come along when she thought it was worthwhile).
She pointed out things we would have never noticed, like windows that had condensation around the edges, which indicated the seals were bad and that when the seals on one window were going out, it was likely they were all on their way out. She'd point out cracks that we didn't notice or water stains (acknowledging she's not an inspector, but it certainly gave us things to ask the inspector about). She noticed when parts of the yard looked worrisome in how it was eroded or angled toward the house. And she could usually estimate for us off the top of her head what things would cost to fix, replace, remodel, or update (or she had someone she could call to ask for an estimate if she didn't know).
EDIT: She also put pressure on the lender when they were delaying the mortgage approval, did all the negotiation on our part with the selling agent, followed up with the sellers to make sure they did all the fixes our inspector found and were put into our contingencies. She also figured out what to do when she reviewed the contractor receipts and found out they had lied about fixing one of the things in the contingencies on the morning of the closing to make sure the deal didn't fall through, as well as how to resolve the issue that the sellers had left a giant moving pod blocking the driveway/garage and went on vacation the day we took possession of the house.
I suppose I could imagine buying a house without her if you had the experience, but there's no way we even came close to matching her years of experience.
Of course, most of the people I talk to have said their experience was nothing like ours. But it makes me think that the problem isn't that realtors bring no value to the table, but rather that maybe there just aren't very many good realtors.