[quote=sdrealtor]I meet real natives of this area who dont know a fraction of what I have learned from my colleagues and friends in the business.[/quote]
You seem to be smarter than the average bear, so that’s not too surprising–especially if it’s an unfamiliar part of town for the “native”, they spend their lives in front of the TV, or they are young.
But the average RE bear, especially one who hasn’t been here long, was worse than worthless to me when it came to the finer points of research. The usual stuff RE folks help with–crime maps, demographics, school district info, etc.–I can get online if necessary … but it’s not necessary because I know my ‘hood and my wife teaches in the district. They will also give me comps, but I can get those online–and not just the ones they pick out. The comps and listings included houses we had actually been in over the years, by the way, so we weren’t just looking at numbers.
I say “worse than worthless” because all I got were guesses or worse when it came to important neighborhood specifics: is so-and-so a busy street, is it quiet/noisy around here, are subsidence issues common around here, etc. I asked just to get a feel for the agents’ honesty, actually–I knew the answers already. Anyone who answered “I don’t know” got a brownie point; correct answers got a gold star. I didn’t award many stars.
But it really isn’t fair to the agents–how can you know more than my wife or I do unless you also had a paper route and did door-to-door band fundraisers in the neighborhoods 20-30 years ago … and have living relatives who did the same things in the same neighborhoods 40-70 years ago?
To ask your own question–can we be the only ones?
Note that I’m not discounting the other things a good buyer’s agent brings to the table. The way the system is set up, an inexperienced buyer on his/her own could get screwed ten different ways and never know it.
For the OP: if you use an agent, do your homework on pricing because your agent will NOT make direct suggestions about how much to offer or (often) how to negotiate the price–there are nasty liability issues for them, which is unfortunate because it’s an area where agents have truly unique experience.
Note that an agent will have a direct conflict of interest in this regard since his commission is helped by a higher selling price (not to mention that higher offers are more likely to be accepted). My agent admitted after the deal closed that he didn’t think my offer strategy would work when he wrote our offer and counter-offer, but it turned out he was mistaken since we paid 4% less than the highest offer and still got the house.
