My buyers agent refunds 1/2 their cut towards closing costs. It’s in the contracts. She does similar on sales.
Here standard commission is 5-6% total and median listing price is 1M.
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I know a half dozen people who were basically underemployed for a long time (house wife, house husband, rich kid) that suddenly decided to become real estate agents. It seems to have stuck with most of them. But I have no idea how much they work at it.
I have one friend, the guy who found my condo, who makes serious money at it. He’s been doing it forever and occasionally gets high-end listings.
Feels like a career where it’s fairly easy to make the median income without working crazy hard or going out on your own, but where if you want to work crazy hard or go out on your own, you can build it up into seven figures.
My cousin is a realtor and he told me how much the top agent in his office transacts per year. I forget the specifics, but my salary range estimate came out to high six figures and this guy is still in his 30s. He’s a worker, and he gets some high price listings.
I’m not sure if this model is gaining any traction, but it’s possible to find a “flat-fee” listing service that basically does this. For example, homie.com is available in several Western states markets including Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas ($3500 flat fee for listing).
I assume other locations would have something similar.
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It is done already, just google low commission realtor. There are companies trying to do basically this e.g. one called Clever
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The thing about being a realtor is that you have to get clients. And most people who don’t have a personal connection to a local realtor are going to pick one of the top few people in their area. So it’s hard to build a business, but then really lucrative if you can get over the hump.
It’s either people who have big social circles who can get their initial clients that way and then gradually build a business through referrals or people who join a brokerage to get clients.
Maybe I am the only guy on this forum who actually thinks I got a valuable service from my realtors (and I was always in corporate relocations plans so I wasn’t paying them myself), but my agents did a lot of good work for me on both the buy and sell side. I definitely feel like being the buyer’s agent is a better gig though.
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I’ve never been on the selling side, but I feel like I got an enormous amount of value from our buyer’s agent.
So uh, NOT stonks 
The Fed announced an expedited and closed meeting on Monday. Twitter reactions range from “it’s an emergency meeting and a near certainty that the rate is going up on Monday,” to “totally standard, no big deal.”
Feels likely to me that either the rate is getting hiked on Monday or tapering is going to speed up, regardless of whether this type of expedited meeting is totally standard.
Same.
Totally makes sense that cruise lines would go from +1% to -5% based on the fed maybe raising rates a little earlier. Rational markets in action.
I think the market was not, and probably still is not, correctly pricing in the likelihood of a series of significant rate hikes. The last time interest was this high, the Fed rate was 11.5%. I don’t think we’re getting near that, but something like 5-6% or even a little more wouldn’t surprise me at all over the next couple of years.
The chances of an inter-meeting hike seem to be opening some eyes to what could be coming.
It seems reasonable for cruise lines to be severely affected by this news, as I assume they’re all carrying a lot of debt right now and may need to take on even more debt to get through this.
I don’t disagree exactly, but this is an explanation of the business problem Zillow was trying to solve, not a reason the whole experiment was doomed to failure. Every two-way market maker is at risk of getting picked off by someone with better information. The solution is to price well enough and do enough volume at the on correctly priced houses so that the spreads you collect outweigh the capital loss. If you can’t do that, then you’re definitely screwed, but the only way you can really find out is to try it and see. Zillow absolutely understood that the adverse selection problem existed, they just thought they had a reasonable chance to crack it and unlock a tens-of-billions-annually market.
Yeah realtor is the profession in Australia for money hungry people with zero education or intelligence. Maybe similar to Pharma reps in USA (from what I’ve heard).
Do you have to be physically attractive to be a realtor in Australia?
Not necessarily but they are all clearly obsessed with appearances.
Not every single pharmaceutical rep is hot, but as a group, they’re well above average.
Also “zero education” wouldn’t really be an accurate description of the typical rep. Although there is often little formal education related to the drugs that they’re peddling.
Pharma rep industry is neutered from the good ol days. Really didn’t have any hot pharmaceutical reps swing by while in med school (and I did go to a fair number of lunches, but that’s all they were, lunches, and the reps weren’t hot).
Device makers, specifically ortho device makers, got it going on though. Did an ortho rotation that had a 2 steak, 4 drink shin dig at Ruth Chris for Stryker, which was awesome.
If you can sell a house, look at the closing statement and see the realtor fees and not be even a little irritated, god bless you.
Oh and I’ve gotten exactly one Pharma rep visit since graduating medical school. It was for eliquis, a blood thinner that I would never ever start on someone. Still ate that Italian food though.