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?
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Realtors can cut out a ton of legwork. A good realtor will know all areas of a city well and only recommend areas and homes which fit your criteria. This can save you a LOT of time and legwork on your own. They also handle all of the paperwork, and there’s a LOT when buying a home.
If experienced, they know the process and bring a lot knowledge to the table. Unfortunately the rate is the same for inexperienced ones.
Ours handled every bump and wrinkle including walking us through what corrections were worth pursuing post-inspection. All we had to do was provide whatever thing (paperwork, check, etc) she needed to keep the process moving forward and providing a calming voice to the whole process.
Don’t get me wrong, it was stressful but way less than if we didn’t have her.
A buyer’s agent does all the work: they advise on options you might want to view, they do all the paperwork for an offer and purchase, they give price guidance and they negotiate on your behalf.
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.
You’re basically hiring them to shop for the home for you. You *could* spend your days browsing website after website or checking out homes in person, only to find out that the houses you’re looking at are nothing like what you’re looking for or don’t have basic requirements you need, **or** you can hire a realtor to do that shopping for you and filter out only the houses in your price range, the size you want, amenities you want/need, etc.
There are too many bad realtors out there, I’ve yet to come across a good one…in our experience every realtor pretty much made me look up my own homes, they did give me like a guest access to their MLS database so it was a bit more in depth in terms of search vs Zillow/redfin, then even when they setup the appointment half the time they didn’t even bother to show up.
The only good side is (or bad) is they got us a conversation with the sellers realtor because otherwise the sellers realtor wouldn’t even entertain us.
I’m sure there are good ones out there but the handful I have experience with was just a commission grab.
I bought a house in a different state. My realtor was great for suggesting a lender, home inspector, hvac company, etc. Essentially a concierge.
I’ve used realtors both ways. Selling all they do is list it on mls, which only a realtor can do. Sometimes, they take phone pics to post. Then they play annoying middlemen with all offers having to go through them.
With buying they just show you the houses. Have to have them to get key out of the lockbox. I’ve always found my own houses online. So the realtor was useless, just a key opener.
Def. Not worth 3% of house sale price for each. 6% total.
As a buyer, my realtor got the price lowered by $8k AFTER we agreed on a purchase price but the home didn’t appraise there. I wasn’t going to lose the place over that amount but our realtor told us to let her do her job. She did and we saved $8k. I’ve recommended her to everyone I knew looking to buy in our area.
Your realtor represents your interests, like an attorney. You don’t *need* a realtor, but the seller has one, and they are *not* representing you.
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