Yeah, but are they hot?
Yeah, it’s not good value for the money for anybody that has a clue about managing their affairs. For the other 95% of people that are signing papers on transactions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s possible that there is a net benefit to society that there are regulations that require the realtor to describe some basic concepts to the people involved. It’s certainly not a “good” system, but a total free market with buyers and sellers signing papers with no intermediaries would be a disaster. People would buy houses agreeing to give it back to the seller in a month or to rent the roof from the seller in perpetuity for $200 a month. People are morons.
I worked in clinical research about 15 years ago and it seemed like all the pharma reps that came through the clinic were either attractive women or ex-military guys. Their cheeseball schmoozing skills were off the chart.
True. I had a friend who was a drug rep and was probably an average looking guy. But the dude was charismatic AF. I wouldn’t even call it “cheeseball”; it was elite.
The skills transferred to his personal life. He dated more than his fair share of drug reps that were way out of his league.
That sounds about right. They are in sales after all. Of course, it’s probably specialty-specific. The ones that hit up a dermatologist’s office will find a different level of competition in that regard.
Come to think of it, I once met a cash-only psychiatrist in Manhattan who was wearing a pretty nice Patek Phillipe. Not too many drug reps are going to compete with that.
I feel pretty sure I got more money for the house than I would have if I was marketing it myself. The realtor also helped me negotiate during inspection phase in ways that probably saved a couple thousand dollars there. If you already know exactly how you want to market your house, and what you want to sell it for, and are good at negotiating large deals then your realtor just going to follow your wishes without adding much value. But if you’re like I was with a demanding job, 2 small kids, trying to buy and sell at the same time and just struggling to get through the whole relocation without running out of hours each day or dropping any balls career wise then having an expert to offload all of that stuff is really worth it.
The scam with realtors is partly that their job doesn’t get incrementally harder as house prices go up but their pay does. If I was selling a million dollar house instead of a house under 500k then I would probably be a little more put off and looking for lower commission options.
Yeah 6% is for donks (at least in my market)
It’s pretty trivial to get 4%ish with redfin or similar competitors . Lower than that is the challenge.
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Can confirm my hot friend landed a pharma rep sales job with almost no experience.
She said the key was to get the women at the front desk to like you. If you piss them off, it doesn’t matter how hot you are, you’re not seeing the doctor. And they’re predisposed to not liking hot new pharma reps. It takes work to get in their good graces.
I think the pharma rep game has changed a lot in the last 15 years, no longer exclusively hotties.
Rates aren’t getting to 5-6 percent IMO. Fed will cause a massive recession before we got to that point which will short circuit inflation concerns and end the need for further hikes.
“cash only psychiatrist” needs a lot more explanation imo
I think we should let @Surf take this one. I’m not even sure I understand the question. It seems pretty self-explanatory to me.
Maybe Zillow should have read Akerlof’s lemons paper before spending billions on houses.
Zillow had a theory that the real estate agent’s cut makes a pretty big spread and there should be some middle price that is more beneficial to the buyer and the seller when the agent is not involved.
There are a lot of problems with that like adverse selection but I also think most sellers who think their home is worth say $500,000 don’t want to sell it for $470,000 commission free even if that would be their take home after realtor’s commissions are taken out. I really think many people are too dumb to do the math and will get stuck on the top line number.
Also many sellers have to let their house sit on the market for a while before dropping the price to the number they will actually sell at. It takes months of being worn down by lack of interest for many people to accept their house isn’t worth what they think it is.
So basically all the ways that home sellers are irrational work against the model Zillow came up with. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do eventually disrupt the real estate agent market in another way though, whether this is by competing with MLS or some other way to replace what realtors do at a lower cost and higher convenience to buyers and sellers. The have the data, user base, access to capital with a risk appetite, etc. They are positioned well to somehow find a way
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A girl who I was in this dysfunctional codependent thing with somehow found a psychiatrist who only took cash. $180/hr. Good work if you can get it.
They’re at the Straight Cash Homie Wellness Clinic.
£999 to sell any house no % but you have to do basically all the work yourself. Probably illegal in America because everything is a government enforced cartel in the land of the free market.
I went back in this thread and caught up a bit on the discussion of Series I Savings Bonds. Seems like a no-brainer. Where it especially seems great is for someone like my dad, who is about to turn 78 and does not want to keep reinvesting money in the stock market (he still has plenty, of course - mainly talking about various bonds that have matured and what-not, giving him cash to invest) at his age. To be able to get a nice rate AND have it be liquid after a year seems fantastic.
Yeah I bought some series I last November after reading about the rates. Honestly the worst part is the treasurydirect website. Signup and user interface were somewhat complex, definitely not geared toward encouraging computer illiterate retirees to DIY