Careful for sure… On commissions, here in California when you establish a contract with the listing agent your contract states both what you will pay the listing agent, AND what you will offer as a commission to a buyers agent.
1 – All commissions are negotiable by law. When you do sign that contract you can in fact tell your listing agent, okay if YOU OR ANY AGENT IN YOUR COMPANY represents the buyer, I want to pay LESS then what I would offer a buyers agent from an outside company. YOU CAN DO THAT and some large firms will indeed agree to do that. Most all of the smaller independents will.
2 – As texguy pointed out the DRE law is very clear. What I said was if you choose to represent yourself, you can negotiate with the Sellers agent, or the seller, to REDUCE the price by the intended buyers agent commission, if you were to represent yourself. (which again I am not a big fan of)
Daniel –
At the bottom of all MLS listings the co-op offered to the buyer is disclosed. However this is only seen when an agent logs in with thier username. If the listings are emailed out this information is distilled out. Also as recently as a year ago most of the developers here in SD would not talk to Realtors. Now most all of them are BEGGING us to bring buyers over. They do however make us accompany our buyers.
One of the biggest mistakes (IMO) that people make is not using a Realtor when they work with new developments. In general the private contracts you sign when you work with the developers are amongst the most one sided I have seen. The people who further mire themselves down by working with the preferred lenders of the developers in order to get some closing costs paid for may indeed be hurting themselves in the long run by not shopping for better financing from the other 10 billion sources to finance a home. The smart person will use a Realtor to get the new home, then use the rebate from the Realtor to pay for the closing costs. I can assure you the Realtor will be much more discriminating regarding that purchase contract then the homebuyer would be. This is TRIPLE TRUE with condo conversions. Also no the price the developer charges does not go up if you bring in your own Realtor.
