Tutorial: Real Estate Agents. There are usually two real estate agents involved in the sale/purchase of a home. The listing agent (works for the people selling the home) and the buying agent (works for the people buying the home). They usually each get a commission of 3% for a total of 6% which the seller pays. If you don't go through an agent to find the home, the selling agent usually gets the entire 6% unless you can talk them down. Agents aren't a bad thing though. They take care of all the paperwork (LOTS!) for you and watch out for your interest in an area most people don't know much about since they only do it a few times in their lifetime. If you buy a FSBO (for sale by owner) it's usually because, like us, we didn't want to give the 6% to an agent....IOW the price of the house isn't generally going to be lower for the buyer. I suppose if you know what you're doing, you can do things yourself and probably save some bucks, but I'm not that smart. When we sold our AF house, we had an agent that listed it on the condition we could still sell it ourselves and not pay commission, which is what we eventually did. She helped us with the paperwork in hopes that we would use her services sometime in the future. Nice gal. Unfortunately I don't remember her name. If you are a buyer, you can have multiple agents looking for you though. If you DO happen to get to a situation that there is no real estate agent involved, a title company can do most of the paperwork for you.

Comments

Chad said…
I've been warned by some people that some real estate agents make you sign a contract with them to start, and in the fine print is a contract stating if you don't buy through them, you have to pay them a $5000 fee. That happened to one of Kirk's friends.
Gramps said…
Run away from that agent as fast and as far as you can. An honest agent will take you around and show you things with no payment nor contract in hopes they buy one of the houses they show you and they will get the buyer's commission from the seller. It's how we bought our AF house. Use someone from an agency you know....Century 21, Remax, etc. or someone like Brigham's dad who you trust.

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