06-01-2016, 12:15 PM
Just curious what those of you who have done various house buying/selling have done to try and mitigate the rather absurd 6% commission for home sales.
e.g., $200,000 house, 6% commission is $12,000, split between the buyer agent and seller agent is $6,000 each. If we assume I pay them $50/hour for their work, that's a solid 3 weeks, 40 hours per week, EACH, selling just my home (or a solid 1 week each if I assume I'm paying them $150/hour, which in a salary job would be about $300,000/year).
Realtors don't do anything like that amount of work -- especially the buyer's agent since these days you probably did a pretty good job of finding the house you wanted online and did your own investigation into schools and so forth.
But negotiating down the commission can get tricky. The buyers' agents may mysteriously get thin if the seller is only splitting half of 4%.
There's always "for sale by owner" and then hire a lawyer to do the paperwork (much cheaper) but I've never really looked into it.
I'm not really aiming to sell anytime soon, just curious what, if anything, other people have done to mitigate the standard 6% commission.
e.g., $200,000 house, 6% commission is $12,000, split between the buyer agent and seller agent is $6,000 each. If we assume I pay them $50/hour for their work, that's a solid 3 weeks, 40 hours per week, EACH, selling just my home (or a solid 1 week each if I assume I'm paying them $150/hour, which in a salary job would be about $300,000/year).
Realtors don't do anything like that amount of work -- especially the buyer's agent since these days you probably did a pretty good job of finding the house you wanted online and did your own investigation into schools and so forth.
But negotiating down the commission can get tricky. The buyers' agents may mysteriously get thin if the seller is only splitting half of 4%.
There's always "for sale by owner" and then hire a lawyer to do the paperwork (much cheaper) but I've never really looked into it.
I'm not really aiming to sell anytime soon, just curious what, if anything, other people have done to mitigate the standard 6% commission.