I charge extra for my "full service" package

3% on each side = 9000
let's assume a standard 60/40 brokeareg split = 5400

minus:
-taxes
-advertising
-real estate board fees
-errors & ommissions insurance
-car expenses
-cell phone

Want to guess what he took home?



Not *always* jerks, but sometimes people just change their mind and decide to wait another year, after MONTHS of looking on evenings and weekends.
yep!
One of the hardest things to deal with. After a while, you realize when you are far better off to just not take the listing

Just had one *almost* fall apart over $1800. Had SO much time invested, the other agent & I decided to swallow the $1800 ourselves just to get the deal done.

It's great to have sellable listings, that's the key. Otherwise, it gets real expensive, real fast.

I think it'd be a mind-bender for most of you to see the monthly operating costs incurred by EFFECTIVE realtors. It's pretty nutty. You need to move A LOT of houses to stay ahead.

my in-office expenses run ~1200/mth
my car/cell miscellaneous expenses run 800/mth

I'm on a VERY aggressive split with my brokerage, which means my monthly fees are quite high, but I need to move MINIMUM 2 homes/mth if I want to stay afloat. A couple dry months and my expense bill starts to get pretty $%#$^ scary. But if I have a couple strong months with several closings, my expenses get licked and I can do pretty good.

It's a gamble though, which is why most people opt for 70/30, 60/40 or even 50/50 splits where more of there expenses are absorbed and they don't pay a flat desk fee. That way you can coast for a while and not get sucker punched by expenses

Same here. JUst curious, if a buying agent wanted to see the place, would they call your agent to book the showing, or call you directly?

=

I saw my realtor at Starbucks the other day.




She makes a great latte! :)

lol, lots of those!
Must be great, when you have your most important asset on the line, to have potential buyers call and be told that the agent can show it "after work"

Oh no...Starbucks is her new career. She was a stripper before becoming a real estate agent.

$500?

Lesson learned.

You paid the price of admission.

Move on.

There is another no-service realtor in town that is highly respected, so no service doesn't necessarily equal crappy realtor. (Actually, he does both no-service and full service.)

Talking to other people, this guy's business model is to get the money and disappear. People like that piss me off. I plan to get a judgment against him. And he's not getting his lock box back until he pays up.

If a buying agent wants to see the place, they call me. They still call me with the new realtor too. I have a vicious attack cat that needs to be taken out of the house if the house is shown.

(Not kidding. The 10 lb. cat has tried to kill my in-laws dog and has been known to corner children and drive fully-grown men from the house. He's not afraid to use his claws/teeth and will go straight for the throat on dogs and people alike. But he's super-sweet to my wife and I...)

Realtors around here tend to call 1-2 hours before they show the house, even if they've had the appointment with their client for a week...

Got my return receipt on the certified letter I sent on Friday with Jack's signature on it. That gives him until Friday after next to get the box off of my door.

I'm also going to start working through the Bloomington-Normal Association of Realtors--the entity that rents him his lock boxes. I won't be surprised to find he is delinquent in his rent.

Last Friday I went to the Bloomington-Normal Association of Realtors to file a complaint and see about getting the lock box removed. (They are the owners of the lock box and lease it to the realtor.) The receptionist e-mailed Jack. She actually stifled a smile when I gave her the name of the realtor.

A week later, I still had the box on my house. I went back to the BNAR today. The receptionist was out, so one of the officers was manning the front desk. She told me to cut the lock box, and they would bill the realtor for the damages. I got out my bolt cutters and did the deed.

They also recommended that I file a complaint with the Illinois Division of Professional Regulation. I'm going to try my hardest to get this guy's realty license revoked.

Wow Chris. Sorry for your troubles.

We're be putting our place on the market soon, but we will be using a college friend who we bought this house with and who sold our last house. If the deal on our new house goes through, she'll make a nice sum of $.

We may way until February to put the house up since the market pretty much goes dead over te holidays. We did this with our old house (same timing) 7-8 yrs ago and the house sold within a month.

In life there's the hard way and there's the easy way.
Let me guess which way you like it? Ha, ha.

Forget about the negative hoopla, yadda yadda and get on with the task at hand.... sell your house already! Seems you've hired a good agent now, put some positive energy into that, keep your underwear picked up and move on; just sayin'

Realtors, i r 1 ;)
Shuswap Real Estate Specialist! : Rob McKibbon - REALTOR® - BIGRob.ca : Home

penny wise, pound foolish.

Filed suit against the old realtor today. The house goes back on the market Monday (took 60 days off the market to wipe out the DOM from the c0(ksu(ker POS realtor). The house out in the country with the 4 acre lot withdrew its listing 5 days after us and will re-list 5 days after us (similar situation).

We either need to sell the house in the next 6 months or it will be a few years before we can think about selling again.

Price it accordingly.

Right now you're competing with a TON of bank sales, foreclosures and short sales which mean you're going to be undercut. I've looked at about a dozen places in the last month and every single one of them with the exception of one was some sort of bank sale variant. The one that wasn't was an estate sale and it was overpriced for what it was (nice house, but it wasn't worth putting an offer in on because you can get so much more for your money with the bank sales).

That's reality right now. Sorry and I hope it works out well for you but it is most definitely not a good time to be selling right now trying to compete against millions of "good deal" foreclosure sales. OTOH, it's a GREAT time to be looking to buy, so maybe you can make it up on the back end even if you have to take a hit on the front end.

Good luck to you and hope it works out.

Right on! Couldn't agree more. They should charge by the hour.

I'd agree with that. An hourly rate is fair and would make people realize that it's real money they're paying for a service (which in turn would call into question the value of that service) rather than just doing the same thing government does with withholding and burying it into sales/transaction cost so it's not "real money" to most suckers.

A lot of what agents do now is automated (just like a lot of professions) and any monkey with a laptop can do it. I see their services as a lot like that of travel agents - they've invented a database which initially was very hush-hush and secretive and unless you knew the secret handshake, you couldn't get access to. However, over the years it has become more and more public to the point it's virtually 100% accessible online and all they do is navigate it on your behalf to save you the time/trouble. Maybe a little bit of footwork but not much (and I'm now on my seventh agent - although this one is decent and genuine and doesn't play B.S. salesman games, I still think she's way overpaid for what she's doing).

Eventually they will go the way of travel agents. There will always be a few, but they'll be rarer than in the past and only really used by a specialty niche sort of client. People are wising up to the fact that they really don't need agents to go online and spit out a few boiler plate forms, then charge thousands of dollars for it. The perception of value is diminishing and once the self-serving "clique" mentality begins to break down, the writing will be on the wall. You're already starting to see it - agents (in my experience) are starting to do more and more by email and by sending web site links. Makes you ask the question, "well, then what exactly do I need you for? Besides the annoying salesperson tactics that is?"

It'll take time, but it's not exactly a career path that I think has a particularly bright future...

Oh, there will always be people who need help even tying their shoelaces (not that buying a house is like tying shoelaces, mind you). I've walked through houses, listening to other potential buyers walk through with their agents...and those customers clearly needed help getting pointed in the right direction. Not saying I know it all--far from it--but everybody needs a different amount of assistance in the home buying process. Some more than others.

I like my current agent. She alone has got us a ton of traffic in September/October. After signing with her, I talked to some of my other friends in the business (should have done it the other way around), but it turns out she is one of the top realtors in the area. We're paying her to get bodies through the house, something we failed at as a FSBO.

Yes, we are competing with foreclosures, but our house is also in much better shape then they are. We're hoping to find a buyer that doesn't want to deal with a fixer-upper.

For the record, there are reputable no-service realtors in town as well, but they aren't generating any traffic for their clients, which was part of the decision to go full service.

We have also seen an across-the-board drop in home prices (which sucks, because we WERE NOT part of the run up--we were seeing 3% a year appreciation when SoCal was seeing 25%). We've cut our price about 12% from where we started so far, and have room to cut more. The physical reality is that we don't fit in the house, and a baby will only make that worse.

It's a bad time in general to exchange estate for capitol. Hope you can at least recover most of what you've invested. A condo in our building went from $60K to $15K in a foreclosure and future buyers will probably expect the same.

Depending on whether you need cash now and willing to take the hit, you might consider renting it for a few years through a managment company.
Also consider not selling and downsizing your lifestyle. This is the most difficult thing for anyone to do.

Who knows what the general economy will be like in a few years....I have some "hope" but it may take decades.

Sounds like you are on track now & good luck with it. Keep up the work on the former no-service realtor too. I once got a judgement against a guy in small claims court for something like $1,600 and knew I probably wouldn't see it. 4 years later I got a call from a gal who was apparently marrying this idiot, and they found out it was difficult to get any loans on cars, furniture, etc. with the judgement on his record. So I actually did end up getting my money. Also it's not only "no service" realtors who don't do their job. About 7 years ago I was selling an income property for a little over $1mil. and engaged a realtor recommended by a couple of people. I negotiated a commission rate of 4.6% with him with a 3 mo. contract. The market was going gang busters at the time in SoCal, so I assumed the property would go pretty fast and thought a commission of around $50K was OK. He listed it in the MLS and would call maybe once a week to tell me he had answered some calls on it and "gone over the numbers" with someone. At the end of the 3 mo. it wasn't sold and I signed another 3 mo. contract. I wasn't hurting to sell the property, but at the end of the next 3 months I told him I wasn't renewing it. I had a little work I wanted to do on the property and decided after that to just put the thing in the paper with a listing over Friday to Sunday. I ended up getting 32 calls that weekend and sold the place by the following Thursday to a real estate agent who bought it for her own portfolio. I agreed to pay a 1% commission that she would pass on to her agency as a sale. It gave me great satisfaction to tell the original guy when he called a few weeks later on, that I had sold it in 7 days for more than he wanted to list it for.