All Forum Posts by: Bobby Narinov

I've heard that most of the multi-family deals never reach MLS/loopnet. They only get there when the seller(s) are unable to trick the local buyers. The posts there usually are meant to attract the "california buyers"(pejorative for a dumb buyer) to which everything looks cheap.

Without an agent I negotiated $40,000.00 off the price. And this is after they dropped the price by $49,999.00 in the last 3 months. I.e. from $849,000.00 to $760,000.00 after that i found an agent willing to give up 1/3 of his buyer's commision ($7,600.00). This house is 17% bigger than 90% of the houses on this track and $55,000.00 cheaper than anything sold in the last 2.5 years.

 So he saved me $5,000.00(I'm adding two separate cases together for higher impact) but charged me $21,000.00. I wouldn't call this saving. Without him i would have saved myself $17-21,000.00.

Imagine yo go shoping and the supermarket industry requires you to use a buyer and a seller agents for your transaction. You don't pay them but the seller pays 6% of your negotiated price to them. Would you shop there or would you prefer to shop directly with the producer where you dont have to pay your hard earned 6%.

Ok supermarkets are not a great example but car purcasing is similar to house buying. Some people own cars that are wort more than the houses they live in. What would the car manufacturers say if you pass a law that requires the use of sales/buyers agents. I bet they'll cry out loud that this new law is going to kill their buisnes and sales will drop. But for some reason the REA claim the opposite. Strange isn't it?

In the Silicon Valley most of the startups choose a name that has a domain name available. This way their name and web site match. For real estate, this may not be required but for a Silicon Valley startup this is a requirement.

Sometimes they come up with very strange names and/or misspelling of common words. The most famous example of this is Google whose name came from Googol (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Name)

I did. The bank agent went out of his way and visited the property during his lunch time. They are a small local bank that is very sensitive about their investments. He didn't like what he saw on the outside: a lot of deferred maintenance. This is exactly why I think it was a good deal. Normal people look at a dump and dismiss  it because they cannot see it's future potential. I know the property needs a lot of work - in the excess of $100,000.00 but once this is done and the occupancy get's raised above the current 52% it will become a great deal. The unit updates can definitely help the rents go up because they are currently under market due to poor property conditions.

The bank agent did ask to keep him posted and offered to give me a loan after the property is updated.

It looks like I did not get what I was looking for.

I got three type of responses:

1. 1. I am doing so many thing that the buyer cannot do but if they know how to use a computer I'll be out of a job. translation: I am praying on the uneducated customers.
2. 2. I am sorry you had a bad experience with sellers agents but they are not all that bad.
3. 3. responses that were not contributing to the topic but for some reasons the posters though they are pretty smart (you know who I am talking about).

I was mainly looking for a response from the real estate agents that are actually doing something that the well educated computer literate buyers cannot do themself. 

We are currently living in an environment where the Realtor's lobby have managed to pass laws that are anti-competitive and because of that they have managed to keep the price of their services at a pretty high level. But their customers had enough of that. Is it any wonder a lot of Americans are turning to RedFin, ZipRealty and other similar establishments when purchasing houses. And this trend is only accelerating. I started seeing individual brokers offering similar services. Soon, we may not even need an agent to show us the house. It is extremely simple to modify the current electronic lock boxes so a person with a smartphone will be able to unlock it himself. And more people will start buying houses directly from the seller's agent. Despite what you say, this seems to lead to the highest number of successful. I wouldn't be surprised if the seller agent is willing to give his buyer's commissioned to customers willing to go with him If this leads to a faster/easier sale (this leads to higher $/hr or $/effort).

Alternatively something completely different may come up. Just look at how hard the currently entrenched (anti-competitive) industries are fighting Uber and Airbnb. The wind of change is coming and unless the realtors start preparing for those changes they may be left behind the way of the buggy makers and phone operators from the 20th century.

 I don't know where to start on that. This is a very naive way to look at buisnes. You probably believe that when the government forces companies to pay higher taxes they are paid by the companies and their customers do not suffer higher prices.

Or as a seller imagine you know you don't have to pay 6% to the realtors wouldnt you lower your price to attract more clients? 

Or let's say you owe as much as the market value of the house is would you sell and come up with the 6% commission or you are going to wait for better prices when you can pass this expense to the buyer?

My hidden purpose for this post was to actually praise the agents that add value and bash those that think setting up a MLS search and opening doors is enough.

Don't take me wrong, I love my RE agents I have used 10+ of them but only 2 of them actually made the cut (talking about 80-20 rule). With all of them I was open upfront that i'll be making 20+ offers for each buy and they are OK with it. with one of them I have 10 offers per purchase, with the other I got 5 offers for each purchase. Even though I try not to create work for them so I was making offers without seeing the property(I know the area pretty well), the second one visited every single property and took additional pictures so I can be better informed. This is something I didn't ask him to do but he did it anyways. I am gladly paying him his 3% commission but the majority of the agents think setting up an automatic search for you is the main thing you are paying them(technically the seller but you are providing the money).

And one other thing that pisses me off - every one of the agents I no longer work, tried to sign me up for 6 months exclusive representation even though I found the property myself and I just asked them to show it to me. I would never sign such an outrageous document. You bring me a deal and I'll buy it (through you) but I would never sign an exclusive deal with you especially If I am the one finding my properties.

Most of those are responsibilities of the Seller's agent and very few are done by the buyer's agent. Showing properties is not an issue if there is an open house. Some of the work is done by the escrow and title companies. I can bring that list down to under 5 items that can only be done by the buyers agent. Still the buyer's agent gets the same commission as the seller's agent even though the seller's agent does 900% more work than the buyer's agent.   

When you are making CASH ONLY OFFER on a property that is sold AS IS and cannot be possibly financed due to holes in the walls and ceiling, has a huge pile of trash in the middle, was used by homeless people as a dump and is missing appliances, there is very little difference between the offers.