1. You probably need an agent when:
a) you don’t know the area
b) you are not around to sell the house
therefore agents working with corporations who move employees around would be the best place to be if i were an agent.
2. An agent or broker is not required in a real estate transaction, period! I have not acted as either, just a homeowner optimizing my profits and spending 40-60 hours or so to do it.
3. the more people know this, the more they will act in their own best interest. Then there will be more money in the seller’s pockets (100 billion per year) and less probability of real estate bubbles and shenanigans. this assumes that central bankers will not make money too easy too.
Bottom line is that with computers and the internet, there are only the reasons mentioned above to have an agent.
Businesses and individuals have been eliminating middle men for a long time and that this has lasted this long is very surprising indeed.
What was funny this latest purchase is that many seller agents were trying not to let us in the door without a buyers agent. I had to threaten the agent to go and see a property listed for sale? This is a good sign that this industry is crumbling and times are getting hard.
I was in CA in 1991 and paid 25% less for the final phase than the buyers in the first phase. It should certainly get that bad or even worse this time around. My price was 212K, the 1st phase sold for 285K and I got one of the largest homes in the hood. There is far more inventory and there are far less buyers, and more buyers are losing their homes this time around so i expect that there will be about 1-2 years of inventory and empty homes on the market before this is finished.
the last bubble took a good 8 years until the 285K guys could get their prices again, I waited 12 years and netted 100K. so this time too, it should take longer..around 10-12 years. if you have any questions at all, rent the same house you would buy for less than the current payments. people are not just standing on the sidelines and waiting, they are renting the same place in the same or better neighborhood for much less than the payments and taxes would be if they bought at current prices. No one in the RE industry is buying today, my cousin who owns 50M in real estate is not buying anything, RE developers are not buying land or options, RE companies are going under. Why would anyone in their right mind speculate in RE today….especially in the bubble areas?
If you can’t hold out 10 years then Sell while you still can get 2004 prices. They will go down to 2001 prices or worst before it is over. I feel bad for so many of my friends in CA who are now in houses over their heads. When they got ARMS and more home than they needed with high carrying costs and taxes, I told them not to. Any one who disputes this does not know simple economics or the banking industry. It will be a blood bath when all the derivitives and other instruments based on RE, crash taking the US down like Japan! when 2 million buyers are eliminated and 2-3 million homes are sitting vacant, supply and demand will take years to work through the inventory, then it will take double that time to recover and it may never EVER get back to these levels again. Florida crashed in the 30’s and most of those prices never recovered even today!
Good luck and God bless all. I am now at less than 15% of my gross for housing/insurance/taxes which is covered by my consulting and side income streams. I hope to pay off my home in less than 15 years. And to think that 20 years ago when I said that it was better to pay off my home and save for retirement, my friends told me that this idea was dangerous as I should be leveraged in RE. Today I am a hero to my family while I can afford to pay for my kids college with my regular pay and help my wife’s family climb out of their housing debt in their retirement years.
