Real estate sales is an industry rife with anti-competitive and corrupt practices. Appraisals, home inspections, lending, and sales are all in it together on this. I absolutely loathe them.
It is a fact that many homes are sold when their occupants die, and offering your services to a potential customer when the customer likely needs it does not seem out of bounds.
Be available as a realtor and market well; allow such customers to find you instead of chasing this particular kind of lead.
So in that way, it's not so much kind as it is exploitative.
Yes, people usually work in exchange for money.
>And you're doing this during, presumably, a time of grief when the potential customer already has a lot to deal with physically and emotionally. And you're doing it because of the event that put them in this stat
Exactly, a real estate agent can take some of the load off. Keeping a home secure, traveling to it if you live far away, etc are not necessarily easy. People have jobs to get back to, families to attend to that may not be nearby, and things need to happen, regardless of emotional events.
"Don't skip the inspection, what if something is wrong" sounds sensible but pre-purchase home inspections are quite surface level, will only find visible, obvious problems, and in the fine print they disclaim responsibility if they miss anything.
It's definitely you get what you pay for. If you have a good home inspector they may be able to tell you something like "Yea, the roof is fucked", or "That crack you didn't notice in the foundation is really bad news".
I don't build homes nor do I troubleshoot them on a daily basis. Someone that does, and has a at least a modicum of experience will still notice more than I.
It's just a very inefficient market, fraught with dark corners. That's why people hate it. A world where an expensive inspector actually meant higher quality would be far better than what we have
This is a consequence of an extreme lack of supply in your area rather than some sort of realtor conspiracy though.
The good inspectors told me about a condo loft that had plumbing issues throughout, probably a $5000 repair, and at a house, a sagging pier and beam foundation causing all sorts of problems.
The problem is inherently that most people are buying a home for the first time. Or they buy maybe 3 to 5 homes in their life.
So it's very easy to build up an information asymmetry / cartel there
If you're not borrowing to purchase a home you probably wouldn't need an appraisal. I think lenders just want objective evaluation of the collateral. Who can blame them?
Maybe there’s good reputable inspectors. Ours weren’t
In the rural south there are some insane claims of title across families. I've seen title work where they had thousands of pages of paperwork involved with hundreds of possible heirs that had to be located.
Now whether that’s worth .5-1% is debatable.
The core problem of the lien is solved, the only thing left is to ensure the lawyers who seem to always get their cake no matter what aren't bloodthirsty enough.
As someone who has submitted (and failed to collect) on a claim against title insurance for legal fees incurred to correct a mistake in the original title that the title company missed, I'm skeptical of its value, at least for things like erroneous lot lines.
They claimed that the seller misrepresented the property by claiming it came with a parking spot.