Realtor Redux
To further prove my point from before, I present this website. It was the design house behind one of the local realtor’s websites where they present information.
I also present this home picture as made by the company using the software. The resolution is phenomenal.
Even this little gem I found reinforces all of my theories (hint, look at the bathroom count).
March 14th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
$126k? I’ll take two!
Make sure you do some research on your Realtor before you do anything with them. Our did such a piss poor job - and got paid $6k in the process - that it looks like she’s going to lose her license.
I’ll be blogging in more detail about it shortly just before I go before the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors’ Ethics Board.
March 14th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
We don’t plan on using one to sell, just to buy.
March 15th, 2006 at 8:55 am
Yeah, that’s what we did too. Their commission is one of the things that affects the closing amount.
March 15th, 2006 at 10:49 am
How much does it affect the closing cost?
March 16th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
When you go to closing, they need $X where X includes the cost of the house, loan fees, commissions (buyer’s agent, seller’s agent, title company, lawyers), appraisal, title registration, taxes, blah, blah.
All of these are laid out explicitly in the closing documents, but some are on top of the purchase price (like the loan fees) and some are included in the purchase price (like the seller’s agent) and therefore simply affect the seller’s take away $’s.
* Obviously the mortgage covers the vast majority of this.
* The Seller can also cover part of it by either paying some directly or indirectly (cutting a check or getting less).
* Agents (both buyer’s and seller’s) can get upwards of 3% each which are already included in the above. Most of them have flexibility in this and can give up any portion of it up to all of it. If the Buyer’s agent decreases their cut, the buyer pays less. If the Seller’s agent decreases their cut, the seller gets more.
The closing costs are the balance… if you are lucky and get a place appraised for more than the selling price, you can often get a slightly bigger loan and have it cover most of those fees. But even then, you’ll still probably have to pay the loan fees.
For our place, closing costs ended up being about 2.5% of the purchase price with almost all of that going directly to our agent.