Rustico,
I’ve been quietly just reading this thread to see what people’s thoughts were. An update on the house: As of right now, I’m nearing my close of escrow. I still have two walkthroughs left to make sure everything is fine. The homebuilder (Lennar) has been surprisingly good so far. We’ve shopped around for mortgage rates on our own and Lennar’s preferred loan agency has been competitive (we decided to go with Lennar’s loan agency). They’ve even given us more money for the close of escrow due to the higher interest rates (If you wanted to know, we pay no fees/closing costs/points. All we pay is 5.99% interest on a 15 year loan. I’m sure there are better deals out there, but some of the companies look shady). So all in all, pretty good. As for the paperwork, it didn’t seem all that complicated. Just had to sit down and read most things. It was pretty “standard” as everyone who bought from Lennar has the same paperwork. I’ll let you know if 1, 5, or even 10 years later that I found out I got screwed.
One of the reasons why I posed this question is that I see agents making a lot of money for (in my opinion), doing very little work. One of the RE agents I originally was with said he sold 20-ish homes a year. At even 300K for a home, that’s 180K+ a year. And watching my RE agent, all he does is show me a bunch of homes, write offers, help with the paperwork, etc…something that will probably take 30-40 hours total (could be longer if I never find a house I like). Of course, I’m only guessing and I may be biased against RE agents (I realize that not all agents sell a lot of homes a year, and there are a lot of customers who take up a lot of time and never end up buying/selling a house. And maybe there are some crazy realtor fees of like 50K a year that I don’t know about).
But what struck me was that RE agents never showed me around new homes. As most people here know, homebuilders are the first to slash prices. So why did my RE agent (and I’m guessing the majority of RE agents) not show me around new homes? I’m guessing it’s because most homebuilders (at least the ones I’ve been to) offer RE agents a fixed amount (something like 8-10K), which is about half of their usual 3% commission. This has lead me to believe that RE agents’ best interest is…themselves.
In general (to me), it seems like for a buyer, an agent is pretty much useless. However, as a seller, an agent can be pretty powerful with tools like MLS. But with sites like ziprealty and redfin, it’s looking harder and harder for me to seriously consider RE agents.
Sorry for the long post, but that’s like my train of thought right now. Please feel free to criticize anything I’ve said (whether I jumped in too soon, my loan’s too much, what am I smoking? RE agents are angels, religion will kill us all…) While my RE agent sentiment may be pretty negative, I really like and enjoy how SD R and sdr have contributed to piggington. And if RE commission was more like 1%, I would actually use them.
