I’ve seen success first hand going directly to the listing agent. They will pay a flat rate for someone in their office to officially represent you and double end the deal. The flat fee is a small token compared to the listing agent’s commission. I believe they do this to make sure the lender (actual owner of the house) will pay out both sides of the commission. Some agents will make sure you know what the highest bid or suggest what you should bid to win. Some will sway the buyer to take your offer even if it’s not the best. We are currently working on a property for my cousin using this strategy. We will know in about a week if this works out. I would not ask for a rebate from the listing agent. I just want to be able to get to the front of the line on highly contested short sales.
I have worked out a couple of deals with listing agents in the past regarding rebate splits. The properties never materialized. I’m still in contact with them and check to see if they have listings that I want. I have an agent that sends me Emails when they get anything similar to what I looking for. When/if they have something I want I can just give them a call and work out something. The rebates have never been that attractive. Don’t think you are going to get 1.5-2% of the listing. You can get a 1.5% or 1/2 commission rebate if you work with a buyer’s agent. Usually they will have to independent brokers to give that kind of rebate.
I have learned that in this market you need to think out of the box. On short sales you have to be creative. If you have an opportunity to talk directly to the listing agent, you can get valuable information regarding the sale of the property. Sometimes the seller wants something that is simple to provide had you just known about it while writing up the offer. We were successful on a highly sought after property because we had some knowledge of what it was going to take to make the deal work. We spoke directly to the listing agent and found out that the BPO had already been done at listing price which was low for the current market. The only problem was that the bank wanted a seller contribution that the seller did not want to make. The offer had to come in at list price and the buyer had to make a secret payment for the seller to the bank in escrow. The seller also wanted a 30 day rent back lease. We simply offered to pay the debt and give 30 days free rent. Put in the offer at list price and guess what we won. There were only 4 offers because the listing agent only showed it to 2 people. We had the lowest bid regarding offering list price, but we were somewhere in the middle as for as offering list + secret money. Had I not had my conversation with the listing agent, we would have made the wrong offer. We did back out of this deal, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a great deal. It wasn’t the right house for us. The house did eventually close 15K higher then what we were under contract for. Even at that price they got the best deal for that floor plan. They paid less for that model then anyone to this date. Plus the house had the most interior upgrades for that model and was in pristine condition.
