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Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

Real estate agents didn’t invent Airbnb.

Like it or not, agents serve an important role in real estate transactions by helping guide homebuyers through an incredibly complicated process. And it’s totally possible to be your own buying agent and save money if you’re willing to put in the work.

“You should offer 20% above asking” is the agent giving you advice on how to win the deal, and a good agent will know when offer above or when to come in slightly under and see how open the seller is to negotiating. The agent doesn’t get paid until you buy the property, so they’re motivated to put you in the best position to buy.

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> And it’s totally possible to be your own buying agent and save money if you’re willing to put in the work.

This is rarely true. The seller has negotiated and agreed to a commission with their agent, and that is getting paid regardless of whether the buyer is represented or not. Perhaps you can negotiate a purchase price low enough that the seller's agent fee is the seller's problem, but only in a buyer's market (which currently does not exist in any major market I'm aware of). The only time it makes sense to not use an agent is if you're confident you can market and close a transaction yourself selling your own property.

It's really unfortunate that there is a 3-6% drag on real estate transactions from agent and brokerage commissions, but various attempts to disrupt this model and drive down the cost have not been successful.

A friend of mine just represented himself in a transaction in a hot market. Typically, the seller cuts 6% which gets split between the buying agent and selling agent. What he did was negotiate that down to 3% to the selling agent and knock another 2% off of the final price.

> It’s really unfortunate that there is a 3-6% drag on real estate transactions

That’s because dealing with real estate is very difficult and tedious, as we’ve seen companies try and fail to disrupt this system.

I did something similar when I bought my place. Negotiated the 2.5% buyers fee to go towards closing cost. Paid for all the closing costs and my mortgage guy baked in like 4 months worth of property taxes into it to soak it all up.

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