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Originally Posted by Kitsune
I'm going to use a realtor, but I've heard many people do this on their own and I'd love to know what the advantages are.
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We used a real estate agent too. Drove around with him, looking at a lot of crappy houses. To be fair, crappy houses were the only houses we could afford. We ended up finding the house we bought by ourselves, from the classifieds. When it came time to negotiate on price, our agent wasn't as tough at negotiating as I wished he was. I believe we paid about $5k more than we needed. Not a big deal considering it was a fraction of the price of the house, but still. The guy we used was a guy we picked based of a word of mouth recommendation. We never recommended him to anyone.
When we first saw the house at an open house, the sellers agent offered to knock 3% off the price of the house if we didn't use our buyers agent. That's because we found the house ourselves and saw it first without our agent there. We felt we owed him, since he had been driving us around for a few weekends, even if he didn't find our house for us. So that's your advantage right there. The buyers agent jacks up the price of the house by 3%. Cut them out of it, and save $$$. But this guy walked us through the whole process. He was pretty knowledgeable, and that helped us, as first time buyers, even if we found our house ourselves.
I still wonder about the whole idea of a buyers agent. I mean, this guy gets paid a percentage of the sale price of the house. It goes against his best interest to get you a really good price on the house. He loses money the harder he negotiates for you. Why wouldn't he just phone it in and let the price stay a little high? The whole concept seems a little crazy.
But we bought before the boom, and our house has almost tripled in value in less than ten years. So I'm not bitter at all.