basically: why would someone need a realtor to BUY a house?
i understand that to buy a house, you (buyer) give some money to the owner (seller) in the form of a down payment and essentially get a loan from the bank (mortgage), and then pay that loan back to the bank over the course of years (decades).
for selling a house, i get that you’d want someone to put up the listing and pull connections to get the word out to buyers.
but for buying a home, where do the realtors come in and why does everyone say you need to get one to be a serious buyer?
In: Other
The buyers agent arranges private viewings and submits offers on your behalf. Ignoring the realty part, an agent works on your behalf to do whatever you pay them to do.
A buyers agent can do more. They can find listings for houses that match the criteria you specify. They can look for these houses so you don’t have to.
>why does everyone say you need to get one to be a serious buyer?
When I was first looking to buy a house, we didn’t have a realtor. We already had a pre approval from a mortgage lender so we were ready to buy and not messing around. We approached the sellers agent directly to view the house. He made it difficult to look at the house without a pre approval letter even though we said we had one.
On the sly, he was eager to work with us because that would have meant he would have been our buying agent de facto and gotten double commission as the buying and selling agent. When we went to our lender for the letter, they mentioned that a buyers agent would help with that. So we got a buyers agent to arrange a private viewing.
The seller agent reached out to me and was pissed that we ended up getting another realtor. I told the sellers agent that we wanted to view the house and he didn’t make it easy and wanted a pre approval letter so we got a buyers agent to show it to him. We weren’t messing around.
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