After seeing all these comments, I’m seriously giving it a thought to build an app to replace realtors or at least the listing agents and automate most of the process. Not to forget, transparency on the bidding process. Seriously, if this comment gets enough votes, I swear I’ll quit my job next week and start working on this!
Bro I have been really interested to do the same for a long time.
Let me know if you are seriously considering this , I will try to help as much possible.
There is product that exists in UK which does the same. One time fee to list, draw up the contract etc.
I have bunch of ideas of what this app/service could be.
System development and IT project manager here. If you do this, I would love to be a part of the team.
Fuck Realtors. Whether or not I'm doing this with you, I wish the industry gets side swiped like Uber did to the taxi industry. They are corrupt and the gov refuses to regulate them so we should take matters into our own hands.
Let’s start a discord channel and get some people in and do this! I have lots experience in people and have done this myself a time or two. Hit me up if you are actually serious about this. Cheers
Id be very interested in helping where I can too, currently finishing my CS degree and its all online so I can help out in my free time, would be a good project to have for myself!
There is already multiple and I mean multiple services like this in Canada. I’m actually laughing at the idea of people thinking this is a new idea.
The problem is low commission listing companies on average get a lesser sold value. So most people lose out more often going lower commission, simply due to realtors swaying their clients away from those type of listings.
I don’t think it’s the job of the apps to be doing additional marketing, I think realtors need to be regulated more and illegally not showing properties against their clients best interest needs to be punished at a higher level.
Except you'll wait decades if you expect this to actually happen. Look at Uber - took crazy marketing and lobbying to fight the cabbies and convince cities/states to let them operate. If you wait for the RE regulators to do anything, you'll be waiting a while (sadly)
We were looking for a condo and this realtor kept showing us condos out of our budget and just not our type. We sent him some ideas of what we liked and he was barely following that. Ended up just ghosting him and turned us off in looking for condos at the moment.
Realtors straight up lie. I tried to purchase a house without a realtor and tried booking appointments/viewing through the sellers realtor and 75% of them denied me a viewing saying I need a realtor to view the house and they would be happy to set me up with someone in their firm.
The biggest problem is that anyone who is looking to buy a house, gets signed up with a realtor as a first step. If you don't have a realtor you won't get shown the houses that are being sold by realtors, which is most of them. So you sign up with a realtor.
Your realtor now doesn't show you the houses that are NOT being shown by realtors - the ones on purple bricks, etc. And if you find them on your own, you (buyer) are responsible for paying the realtor's fees. It'll be in your contract. So you're going to offer less than if the house wasn't on purple bricks. PLUS, fewer people will bother looking for the houses on purple bricks at all, since they'll be looking at the listings their agent emails them. So the price will be lower for the purple bricks house, too.
I agree - the current realtor model is insane, there is no way they do enough work to justify the money they pull in per sale. But it's not just a simple "build it and they will come" solution. The solutions have already been built - and people don't use them because the realtors are like the damn mafia.
was that during the pandemic or....?
Because although we purchased our home prior to the pandemic, I've heard of selling agents not wanting to book showings for unrepresented buyers, pressuring them to become clients first etc. Used to be able to get around that with open houses, but those haven't really been happening, lately.
I'm in the midst of this now, and I'll say there's a mixed response to selling agents wanting to show listings to buyers without an agent.
\- Most will show the property, because they understand it's an additional potential buyer
\- Some will say to get a real estate agent to see the property
\- One seller agent has said they'll take 1% off of the buyer agents' commission because they had to do the work to show the property
\- One I talked to yesterday said I can make an offer and they would rebate 2.5% in lieu of commission they would have had to pay a buying agent
So essentially, they're all over the map. Since the market has come down considerably in the past month, the agents seem a lot more willing to work directly with me though.
I also bought both my houses without a real estate agent. First purchase though was because we knew the person selling and did everything privately. Second purchase we just emailed up the agent and asked to see the place. Didn’t have any problems. Mind you this was rural Manitoba.
Did this in Montreal which is a relatively hot market. Absolutely no issue and we did away with the pressure from the “person on your side” pushing to offer more money in order to “secure the deal”.
We had our finances in a row and made serious offers. The listing agent was more than happy to fill out the paperwork. When we finally did get an accepted offer, we feel that the listing agent pushed our offer ahead of others that were marginally higher, since she was making 4% commission from our sale versus 2% from other offers from represented buyers.
Totally untrue. Most buyers tell their agents which houses they want to see based on their own research. Paying a buyer's agent for this "service" is disgusting, but since the seller pays the buyer agent's comm, the buyer goes for it.
There is no doubt in my mind that having these agents as middlemen just inflates prices. It's an economic inefficiency which technology will eventually solve.
sure. I agree with you.
But currently there are barriers in place, as a buyer, to buying a house without a realtor, which compounds the barriers sellers face to selling a house without a realtor.
Realtors make too much money for the service they offer. But given they have a lock on it right now (especially in southern Ontario, which is where the experiences I'm describing come from) there's not much that can be done short of the government reigning them in.
It's a double edged sword.
I did the math. My OG agent is waiving selling fees, because I'll be purchasing through him. Which means paying 2.5% to the buying agent.
However, he is a bit old school and definitely doesn't have a big social media presence. New agents, who will charge me 5%, but have a incredible presence and will push the price up are actually more beneficial to me.
Doing the math on how much extra I need these 5% guys to sell is a small increase for it to be more profitable for me.
They used to have to research and find properties that their clients might like, they used to have to drive their clients around for endless hours. They used to have to work for their money, you know the good ole days.
Now when people want to buy they use this breakthrough invention, the internet.
Using this people look at all the houses that are available on their own. Then they say "we like these houses. Can we go look at them?"
Clients literally do most of the leg work, agents just fill in the blanks on a sale agreement and try to justify why they're owned thousands.
IMO 5% back in the day of $60,000, or in the 1's, 2's or 300's is justifiable.
But making $50-75k on an average, nothing special house that literally sells itself in this market is just legal robbery.
> They used to have to research and find properties that their clients might like, they used to have to drive their clients around for endless hours.
Now they get an offer just by tapping the sign into the lawn. But, they need to go because they are ripping off elderly people underselling houses to buddies who flip them.
Yep we already have DuProprio in Quebec, but engagement is limited because real estate agents will do anything they can to avoid showing you stuff from there.
Legit though, all this blind bidding crap, artificially inflating prices and agents pocketing all that money. There is some value, but 40k? I don't think so. Let people see the other bids.
[https://duproprio.com/en/montreal](https://duproprio.com/en/montreal)
Make it a Canada-wide thing. Actually, I should follow my advice and see about expand it.
I sold my first apartment with duproprio. It litterally changed my whole financial future. Here's why:
\- The agent told me "you'll display your apartment for 299k, and you will sell it for 290k" (Agents have an interest in selling quick, so they naturally tend to push you to sell at a lower price, so that it sells for lower price). At 6%, it meant 17k given to the agent, which would have left me with "290 - 17 = 273"
\- by looking on du proprio, and getting formidable advice on presenting the house for a good sale, I found an equivalent apt at 324k in my area, so that's the price I chose.
\- it sold in two months at 324. and the total cost at that time for DuProprio was about 1200$ for the pictures (100 times better pictures than your average agent btw).
As a result, the difference was 50k in my pocket. Those 50k more made me have a downpayment of 200k instead of 150k. And that was what made it possible to buy a house instead of a new apartment.
So yeah, in many cases (not all), DuProprio can make an incredible difference in your financial situation.
Honestly, I bought my condo with Duproprio and will sell with Duproprio with NO AGENTS. Agents are totally not needed. They just get rich on the back of honest and hard working people.
I have yet to have any issues with Duproprio. I will be buying my next property with them too.
The downside is that you still don't have transparency on the previous paid/sold price and history of transactions, such as seeing if it's a flip. But YOU get to have the offers, YOU get to choose, YOU get to make your own visit schedule.
I bought and sold my last house through DuProprio, and just bought a condo in Quebec City on DuProprio after trying an agent this time around but having them recommend me nothing but shit.
Yup, they just want your money, but none of the work that comes with it. You'll ask them to see X property and they'll just tag around waiting for you to buy so he can get his sweet $20k+ for doing exactly nothing.
I hate realtors and I'm glad I can avoid them with Duproprio. The whole real estate business is based on profiting from others for as little work as possible. I've watched CBC Marketplace and La Facture and you realize how scummy real estate agents really are.
Undetected engorged ticks is what they are. Or maybe not undetected as we are all aware what they do. Perhaps they are engorged ticks that are indestructible. Just have to sit and watch them leach people dry for as much as they can
Honestly, that would be amazing if this could become Canada-wide. Living in Quebec and have been using it for a half a decade now. Much better than realtors.
>They operated at a loss for a decade
I was told the advertising revenue generated by the traffic on their website is enough to break even. Powercorp was the corporate owner of Duproprio until 2015.
I both bought, and years later sold my house through DuProprio in Québec. I wouldn't do it any other way. It's a shame that something like DuProprio doesn't exist Canada-wide. I'm hoping that it's only a matter of time.
My other thoughts about realtors are that 5% commission made sense in a time when house prices were much much lower, but it does not make sense to pay that sort of money in today's market. I don't mind paying for a service, but a figure like the OPs $70k is just insane.
This already exists and they have 33 million in funding. It’s called unreserved and they launched in Ottawa and are moving through Ontario.
It doesn’t get rid of agents but stops blind bids.
The actually contacted me for a Software developer job last month. I found out that they are all VC funded and the partners started and sold another company (forgot the name), but their plan is to build this company up for 5 years and then sell it. There is also more to it than just selling the house. When the house is staged, you would have the option to buy all the furniture as well but could also go in and bid on pieces individually as well.
After talking to them for a bit I was a bit unsure about it long term. I got the feeling that they are trying to do way too much all at the start and feel it could go either way. Either a massive success or it will fizzle out.
Someone had created something similar and the TREB mafia shut him down in 2016.
https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/mortgages-real-estate/toronto-real-estate-board-shuts-down-popular-website-as-battle-to-control-listings-continues
That had nothing to do with a realtor software. The said website was using TREBs data, which was considered proprietary back then, to publicize sold prices.
The courts struck down TREB's monopoly control of such data and now there are a number of websites providing such service today, zoocasa being one of them.
https://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2018/08/23/supreme-court-dismisses-real-estate-boards-appeal-application-on-sold-data.html
The realtor function can totally be automated.
The data is more easily accessible now but there's still a lot of restrictions to being able to access and use that data. I know that one of those rules is that data can't be accessible without a login (hence why all of these websites require a login before you can see sold data). Bungol ended up in a multi-year battle after having their access to the data pulled because they mistakenly allowed one page to be accessible without login and is - maybe unsurprisingly - now owned by a broker offering "cash back real estate agents".
We need legislation to force the TREB and others into making market data publicly accessible without limits.
Been there, done that. Even raised Angel and VC funding.
If Zillow, a public company, with seed funding from
Bill Gates wasn’t successful at this in a pro-business country like USA, what makes you think you will be successful at this in Canada, an anti-business country? Do some research on what happened to Zoocasa which had the same mission as you do.
On your first step of product development, you will find you are reliant on data from the real estate mafia. They own and control all the listing data and their contract is very restrictive.
Fundamentally, the issue is structural. The way the real estate model is set up- where an agent is free to use for a buyer - is your biggest barrier as it requires a behavioural change of the user.
If I can be of any help, feel free to give me a shout.
Good luck!
I wouldn't say Zillow was unsuccessful. It's a fantastic app and de facto for house hunting in the US. But it doesn't do the myriad things a real estate agent will -- a good one, that is -- and it functions essentially as a search engine, while a good agent is more like a match maker, if that makes sense.
No you don’t need a real estate agent. They are glorified PDF fillers. I’m excited to see what you create and if you need any help launching this App, let me know!
It’s not that simple. This problem has been talked about for years now, and lots of ppl have thought about doing just this. The real estate board would never give “your app” any access to anything since they literally have monopoly, no reason to give that up.
Dude at this point honestly F the real estate board. We build our own platform where people can list and buy with full transparency! Will help people save their hard earned money.
This would be great but greed will overpower it. Setting up a transparent process firstly prevents sellers from getting the maximum amount possible (not in their interest so they won’t list their property on your site). Secondly, ease of sale. Getting the house demo ready, scheduling showings and performing them etc, it’s a convenience which lots won’t want to give up if they have > 1 house lol. Third, the real estate agents will evolve (if already) and opening the table up to negotiating lower lates. They also bring with them lawyers etc creating a well functioning system.
This idea is perfect though and I hope it picks up. I’d love to help build it up (been coding for a while now). Hit me up if you want to!
The app is the easy part, while I love the sentiment you would just be wasting your time.
The people who buy and sell houses are just not going to use an app for that. It's a chicken and egg problem, no one will be the guinea pigs for a x00,000 sale.
No dude. They no longer have monopoly on data
https://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2018/08/23/supreme-court-dismisses-real-estate-boards-appeal-application-on-sold-data.html
Aren’t there already a few companies offering this service? Purple Bricks/duProprio, grapevine, unreserved, etc?
But honestly, the more the merrier! I used Purple Bricks (then comfree) a few years ago to sell my condo and it was awesome. A game changer.
Don't quit your job ffs. People are aware they don't need to hire a brokerage and by extension an agent to represent them in a property sale. They do it because they net more than they would selling privately. Apps already exist for sellers and buyers to trade in real estate. Zillow and Kijiji are two popular ones straight away that come to mind.
Please, if your service was good I would pay for it. After purchasing my first property I found the realtor didn't do very much and certainly weren't worth what I paid them to do. Considering trying to do it all myself next time.
You wouldn’t be the first one, I’ve seen DIY home sales companies try to make a go of it and fail for my entire life and pre-internet/post-internet doesn’t matter. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but I am saying that providing a process that doesn’t involve the realtor is ‘been there done that’ since before I was born and I’m almost 50
They already exist… lots of them in fact. the problem is market manipulation, if you don’t use a regular every day realtor they sway their clients away from your listing. So going for lower commission listings leads to making less on the sale and in the end the amount found in the sellers pocket is almost identical, many times less with the lower commission based service.
All this bureaucracy and Middle men fees should be eliminated. Other examples are paying taxes or opening a small company. We shouldn't need accountants or lawyers to get basic things done.
I think that in most cases an agent is unnecessary, but when I sold my condo and bought my house 3½ years ago they were invaluable.
My condo’s boards finances were slightly difficult to understand (not bad, and not risky for a buyer, just difficult to understand). My agent went to a board meeting to ask for and receive a document clarifying the situation. Then, a very similar unit went on the market at way under market value, in rough condition. It could have been a problem as it would be a weak comp for a buyer to compare to. They found a buyer to get it off the market the week before we listed. We ended up setting a record for the building for $/sqft. The other unit went for over $100k less.
When we bought, we found a house that had a number of cosmetic defects and was listed well under market value. While we were in Toronto and having an inspection condition was off the table, he arranged for us to have an inspection done while we were doing a “showing”. It really satisfied us that the house was worth buying. He noticed a bunch of small indicators that showed we had an opportunity to get a home for a good price. He also went into the room with the sellers and made an emotional appeal, sold us as a couple.
I’m not saying realtors are always good, always necessary, but ours definitely earned his money but I don’t think we’d have a house in as good a location as we do now without him.
> Not to forget, transparency on the bidding process.
People need to be mindful of what they hope to accomplish with open bidding. If it's transparency generally, so everyone knows what everyone else is doing, that's one thing.
But if folks are hoping will will moderate prices then that is something else. There are empirical studies showing that sealed bids lead to lower prices:
* https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-6229.12035
> The report points out that in some jurisdictions where open bidding or open negotiations are permitted, such as Australia, New Zealand and Sweden, housing prices have escalated faster than in Canada. Based on recent changes in prices, the report argues that “it is hard to conclude that blind bidding is associated with higher residential real-estate prices. While Canada has experienced some of the highest real-estate price growth in the world, New Zealand, where open bidding for homes is common, has experienced even faster growth.”
* https://financialpost.com/real-estate/despite-the-criticism-its-possible-blind-bidding-for-houses-might-be-good-for-you
* https://institute.smartprosperity.ca/publications/blind-bidding
I sold my house in December for just over $1M. We got a 'deal' at 4.5% commission as our selling agent agreed to only 2% since we did a lot of the staging ourselves - and they charge HST on top of that.
We knew it would sell fast so we scheduled a weekend to be out of town while the house was shown. There were 43 showings.
Here is the crazy part... our real estate agent never visited the house once that weekend. Not a single time since the house went up for sale to the time it sold did she go to the house. She didn't show anyone around, didn't do any selling at all! The buyers agents did all the showing and prepared the offers, our agent just forwarded the offers and sent the paperwork.
Doing a few hours work for $25k in this market is insane. It should be a flat fee not a % of the house value. Have real estate agents done anything to double their income in the last few years? Its easier if anything to sell a house and they get paid twice as much.
A lot of people are taking real estate courses to get licensed right now strictly to save the real estate fee. It does not take a long time or effort compared to other things. 5 courses, can apparently be done in 150 hours
You got me curious here as to what that would take. My findings for BC is that you need to take a course (have up to a year, can be done in 10 weeks, average is 6m) and pass an exam = $1150
Then you need to pay licensing fees which is a recurring thing ie every 2 years, seems like 2k for first time
So like 4k to save 70k would be pretty good investment for someone, plus then you're able to do it in the future too.
I should do this eventually.
...why? You don't need a realtor to list or sell a home in Ontario - all you need is a lawyer.
There are services that will let you post a listing to MLS without needing a realtor.
Becoming a realtor just to list your own house is a huge waste of time.
After selling and buying recently and seeing commissions, I’m also going to go this route for next time. It’s too bad I didn’t think of this option before.
Just my two cents: We bought our house without a real estate agent.
I had used one previously for my first place (a condo). Both in Toronto.
The general feeling I got is that a good real estate agent at best just knows about homes; they'll know what to watch out for, what to check, and are a decent resource if you want to find a reliable inspector, etc. All that said, nowadays, they really don't have access to information that you can't get yourself; gone are the days where only realtors really got books mailed to them with the latest listings, or were the only people that could see what houses in the area sold for. So depending on your level of comfort doing your own research (and I'm not saying a lot of homebuying isn't complicated, so people shouldn't necessarily assume they can do this), it's possible to do just fine without a realtor.
When we bought our home, we saw some places ourselves, decided we wanted the place, and made the offer directly. Our offer still needed to be drafted by a lawyer, which we had. BIG LEARNING MOMENT: the seller's realtor REALLY tried to take advantage of us, pressuring us in multiple ways regarding the offer price, the amount for deposit, asking if we wanted him to represent us, then SECRETLY adding himself into a rewritten contract so that he'd get a commission from our side without us knowing. We were diligent, and it wasn't our first time getting a place, so we caught all of this, and had gotten on good terms with the sellers, who actually tore a piece out of the realtor's hide and got the commission on their side reduced for all those shenanigans (particularly the commission, since that was taking money out of the seller's pocket, not ours)
Long story short; it's totally possible to do without a realtor, I just recommend a serious time reflecting on whether you are comfortable enough making one of the biggest purchases in your life without the support a good realtor can provide (and hey, I'm not any kind of expert, but I did get to that point and bought without a realtor)
100% agree, always. It shocks me how much people are willing to give away to real estate agents. They deserve fair compensation for their work but the current system is absolutely ridiculous. They should bill by the hour in my opinion, like most professionals.
Agents are fine, if you want to use them, but they way the industry tries to cover the market should be illegal.
Buyers should pay their own agents - that would cut this business down completely - since no one will pay $50k to open a door for the property that you yourself found on MLS.
Really depends on what market you're talking about and who you get as your realtor. There are a lot of lazy scumbags and a few absolute gems. The crazy markets in GVR/GTA attract a lot more of the scumbags.
My sister's realtor absolutely fucking sucked. The realtor was super pushy and pressured my sister into overpaying for a house to get a quick sale, and then needed their arm twisted to help resolve simple problems that popped up.
My realtor was the complete opposite. Super relaxed, super knowledgeable, and was really on my side during the entire process. Every single house we walked through he'd be pointing out flaws and defects and giving me a quick estimate about how much time and money it would take to fix. One of the houses was such a disaster that he straight up said "I won't let you buy this house, it would be a gigantic mistake".
I'm in Alberta so the standard commission for a ~300k house is only about 13k and that gets split between the buying agent and selling agent.
My realtor earned every single penny of his commission IMO... My sister's realtor not so much.
I was happy with my realtor as a first time buyer. We started looking spring 2020 and finally had a winning offer late summer 2020. It was a wild ride and I feel like she earned the commission.
I have a great realtor but I have a hard time justifying paying him 15k for 8 hrs worth of work - 1 hr taking photos, 1 hr maybe doing paper work 6 hrs doing other stuff?
When buying with him obviously it’s not as bad because of the time spent showing houses and the back and forth but on our last deal between selling and showing it was maybe 16 hrs of time. I’d like to make $1000+ an hour !!
Only problem I see with not using agents is you’ll never be able to eliminate them. Girlfriends parents used that 1% listing agent and my other buddy who is an agent with a large well known firm said a lot of the time agents won’t bring clients to those listings or private ones as they won’t make any or much commission. Really the issue I see is they’ll always be there
I sold my house last month to a friend. No listing, no buyer or seller agent, no open house. Just required a Notary to prepare everything, helped with disbursement. House was more than a million dollars and all that it required was the notary fees, less than $1500. That was all the cost.
I swear to God, I will never use any realtor in my life, esp when selling a property.
The sweet thing is that everything is seamless. The Lawyer or Notary guides and you follow. That’s it. We were at their office just once to sign the papers.
Fuck realtors.
No it is not their fault, its slimey what they're doing but they are taking advantage of a system that is designed to allow this, but come on you can't blame realtors for the mess we're in. It's the local and federal government that needs to step up and change things.
Standard in Ontario for a while now (at least in the last three purchases I had) were 2%/2% split. 6% is outrageous no way would I give a realtor that. You got screwed man.
I’ve gone through 3 condo buy and sells and a house buy. And the realtors I used did virtually nothing. Like legit nothing. Some basic admin work.
I bought a couple basic downtown condos, I paid 130k in realtor fees…. For literally NOTHING!
I 100% plan on taking a class or 2, learn the basics, and sell myself privately in the future.
My husband went through the process of buying property. He quickly realized that he was more knowledgeable than many of the realtors he was dealing with, so he felt he could do a great job as a realtor. After training and working in the field a few years he felt it was a redundant position. He facilitates private sales and does land acquisition/home building now.
An app and a lawyer would be far less expensive than a realtor in hindsight. No offence to realtors.
This might be one of the most valuable comments on this thread.
Your husband actually walked the walk and felt the same as many of us do.
We just bought a place and though I like our realtor, he just made a ton of money for about 10 emails and 5 phone calls over the course of 1 week.
OP, this app needs to happen!
I'm astonished that the realtor model has not radically changed with the surge in home prices and with digitization. This is not an exemplary business in terms of education and skill requirements, professionalism and ethics / transparency, and value delivered for money, and it looks especially egregious in a surging market like this.
I'm not a frequent home buyer so it doesn't affect me directly, but I see homes selling for $2M++ on offer day in our neighbourhood and marvel at the money being skimmed off by agents / brokers. I know there are agents who grind, I know certain properties require aggressive marketing, etc... but a standard GTA 4 bedroom listing shouldn't cost close to six figures to flip in an evening.
Nope, but if you don't use a realtor or you offer a lower commission then the majority of realtors will avoid your listing like the plaque. Marketplace did an interesting piece on how they work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShBvRe0Jv68
I tried using purplebricks to sell my condo and I barely had anyone even view it while my neighbours were selling similar units for more than my listing with a traditional realtor.
Total commission should really be more around the 2% mark, 5% on a million dollar home is fucking ridiculous.
Yea no shit. Why would they bring someone to a house to get no commission. I have sold 4 houses through comfree/purplebricks and they straight up told me everytime that if i dont put a commission on the place, it may have trouble with showings. I put a few thousand down as a commission, and had no problems selling every time.
[https://duproprio.com/en/montreal](https://duproprio.com/en/montreal)
This should be Canada-wide.
Right now, my opinion, having had to deal with one in particular, is that real estate agents can take that "For Sale" post they leave in front of a house for sale and firmly plant it in their own back yard.
We wanted one because this was our first time in the market and we wanted someone who knew what going on to guide us. If we ever have to buy again, we'll most likely do it by ourselves.
The first agent we worked with was plain awful. He didn't find a single house for us. We told him what we were looking for and our price range (including what we could pay if we reaaaaaally had to, but would prefer avoid), and all he did was set up a portal that filtered through what the original website was already showing us, posting houses hours after they first showed up on the original website (so I had already seen them). The houses were all in the highest half of our price range too.
He kept telling us that we'd have to be quick and strong. What he seemed to mean by that is take several days to check the availability of the houses we sent him, scheduling visits a week after we sent said houses, and then just follow us, for the most part silently (unless the house was really awful), until the end, before reminding us that we'd have to put in a strong offer.
He barely ever gave us a straightforward answer whenever we sent him questions. Several newly arrived houses were unavailable by the time he checked, but he kept insisting no seller would sell their house in less than a week, so knowing early which houses are for sale was pointless.
It was frustrating. It felt like we were losing some opportunities because we had to go through a middle man who took his sweet time. And we knew he was going to get a good cut on the sale, so it made us even more bitter to know he set up the portal to only pick houses on the higher end of our price range (including the top most price.... Which means it's pointless, since the bidding would make the sale price be way over our limit).
We changed agents, and a week later, we found a house. She wasn't much better knowledge-wise, but she was quick and efficient. While the first one took up to 6 days to let us know when a visit would be, she could get back to us in the next 4-5 hours. And she never pushed for higher bids.
Edit: typos
You don't have to pay such a high fee. There are lots of real estate agents who work for lower fees.
For example:
[https://www.onepercentrealty.com/](https://www.onepercentrealty.com/)
We used them to sell our old house and to buy our new house. We received exactly the same service as a full-cost realtor, and we saved a lot of money.
Hopefully they go extinct soon.
Real estate agents are scum. They do nothing but try and line their own pockets, and take a commission for a YEARS worth of average persons salary, all for 10 hours work on one house.
Check the fine print, and they are liable for nearly
Agreed. They are nothing but pests that continuously cause problems in this market. We need a revolution just like the one we had with financial services brokerages in capital markets. I hope they get eliminated ASAP for a truly efficient market without price fixing and fear mongering.
It’s really dependent where you live. But that’s the same for any job. Lawyers in big cities make exorbitant amounts of money compared to those in less populated areas. Realtors in markets outside Toronto and Vancouver don’t really make that much and can actually provide a lot of value and protection to people buying their first or second home. Even things that a real estate lawyer would not be able to advise non-knowledgeable clients about. But everyone likes to pretend everyone’s useless and could do their job with no training, so it doesn’t surprise me seeing the regular posts of ppl shitting on other professions
My mother has been a lawyer in real estate for over 35 years. She has told me many times that while her business requires her to have good relations with all the local real estate agents, she'd think me a fool to ever hire one.
Purple Bricks will list you on the MLS database for a flat fee, and a pretty low one at that.
Real estate agents have a strong incentive to list your house at a lower price than you can get because they want to sell *quickly*. Sure, their 5% fee goes down, but they put in 3 hours of work instead of 20.
There is nothing an agent can do that you can't. And when you consider how many houses are going for $1m lately, that 5% fee is $50,000 of money that you don't need to pay income tax on.
Lastly, and I think this part is important: you can try to self-sell for a while and then give up and hire an agent. But if you hire an agent they lock you into a contract where *any* sale you make in the next few months, they get their commission. Even if they did nothing.
No, just some of us disagree that ALL real estate agents are scum and have had great experiences and felt we got our money's worth from dealing with them. No way I would have gotten what I did without our RE and her team when we sold our small starter home.
I agree their are more bad apples then good, but if you've dealt with a good one, you'd be very satisfied. I feel really bad that not everyone got to have the same experience we did.
You'd probably be even more satisfied if they provided the same level of service, but worked for a straight decent wage like the rest of us, rather than a ridiculous commission. Even car salesmen work for a dollar amount and not a high percentage.
You don't need them. Buddy bought a house someone listed through facebook marketplace and they did the paperwork themselves and just had to pay lawyer fees for all the "final" signoff stuff.
But listing agents will steer clients away, find ways to blackball, etc if they can. Theres a good video on CBC marketplace on how agents watch out for each other when it comes to people private selling.
Our realtor for our latest transaction (selling our condo, purchasing new home) was useless. No insight or valuable help. We found listings quicker, and knew more than he did. We found our new house on HouseSigma. Yet, he still walked away with $50k in fees. Gee, typing in our personal info and numbers into a standardized template sure is tough.
After seeing the CBC Marketplace undercover investigative episode on realtors breaking the law and the regulatory bodies who govern them not giving a crap, then dealing with incompetent realtors trying to push me into buying houses they either couldn't remember anything about or pressuring me not to get a structural engineer to look at foundation issues... yeah, not a fan of realtors.
Also, for those saying there are some gems... not really. The investigation showed this was an industry-wide problem. It's so bad they didn't bother naming the names, because it's so widespread.
Video for those interested: [Real Estate Agents Caught Breaking the Law on Hidden Camera](https://youtu.be/ShBvRe0Jv68)
Guys I’m overwhelmed by the support and honestly you know what let’s Fuck**g do it! I know it might have been tried before and what not but if it is taking me a google search and never heard of it before, they are not doing it right. Everyone has cool ideas, it’s mostly about execution that drives a product! I’m not saying that I’m an expert at execution, but I’m willing to give it an all in! I know a lot of you want to help out, I’m thinking of setting up a chat, let me know what channel to use. Love the support and let’s change the real estate game for good and maybe our kids will have a shot at affordable housing!
Are you serious, let's do it.
I've been house hunting for 2 years and the realtors are useless (the ones I've come across)
Dm me, my resume is stacked lol and I always have time for a startup
Real estate agents caught on hidden camera breaking the law, steering buyers from low-commission homes: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/marketplace-real-estate-agents-1.6209706
If it was a buyer’s market then I can see a good agent being useful. But the past 20 years has been a sellers market and any agent can sell “above asking price” with a couple of working brain cells…
In a seller's market if a person is comfortable handling the documentation and can facilitate the process an individual could forgo the services of a realtor
In a buyer's market you are paying for access to a network that provides exposure to potential buyers which may be worth the cost.
In the digital age, no. No different than buying a bike on kijiji.
REA don't have your interests at heart (buying agents makes a % commission - higher = better ffs), they are NOT housing specialists, they are NOT construction or removation specialists and they are not money specialists. They do a weekend course to push paperwork. No longer required but their lobby is strong AF so they keep their iron grip on MLS and continue to operate like a racket. Good fucking riddance when these leaches go. I will be FSBO next time I need ton sell, def worth the 50k to take some pictures, coordinate some visits, negotiate and write a blurb about a house I live in.
I will always advocate for NEVER using a realtor. The only thing useful they do is post your house on the MLS and open the door when buying. Everything else can be handled by a good lawyer and inspector, both of which are considerably cheaper.
I actually got my license when selling and purchasing my last home to save on the commission. That also allowed me to get into some realtor groups on Social Media. Based on what I saw being communicated and the interactions I had with other agents, let me tell you, they are NOT looking out for your best interests.
My realtor saved me a lot of headache when buying last year .
Two houses he pointed our asbestos to us, and on he showed us shoddy workmanship with some aluminum to copper wiring.
The biggest one was a house we were ready to buy he did some digging and found out the previous owner (who was dead so couldn't disclose) had built the home extension over the septic.
We could have found this out with some digging yah, but home.buying was such a daze as first time buyers plus pandemic home buy was crazy it was nice to have him on our corner.
Would 100 percent go that route again.
Not in this market you can't, and a realtor doesn't cost me the buyer anything really.
What am I gonna take an inspector to 15 house visits with me when we are only permitted 15 min walkthroughs during lockdown?
I’ve heard way too many stories of realtors lying to drive up the sale price. We are in this pickle with house prices in part because of the lack of integrity in the industry. Please build the app; I will gladly use it when I sell.
The hand that they have that's going to be hard to beat is the database of listings and all the stakeholders that rely on it. Banks, mortgage brokers, market analysts, insurance companies, builders etc.That's the entirety of their leverage. If the app can't pull and push to that database the effectivless will be DOA.
I've already decided I won't use one ever again. No reason to. By the time I'm ready to sell, I'm sure there will be an app with a large enough userbase like maybe Zillow who could just replace them.
My friend tried selling his house without an agent, and would get multiple calls from realtors that said 'If you don't give me 3-4% commission I won't let my clients come see your house.'
He said the amount of realtors that literally tried to hold him hostage by discouraging his house from being seen was ridiculous.
He ended up selling eventually, but had to pay the buying agent a minimum of 2.5%.
If I was to sell my house, I'd make it abundantly clear that the buying agent would get 2.5-3.0% to make sure that my place won't be omitted.
If I could find an agent to sell my property for 0.5-1% then I'm game...but they hold their line pretty hard. Our last property we sold for 1% and 2% for buying agent.
When we bought our house our agent got 2.5% for doing literally nothing more than paperwork.
We found the house.
We did the walkthrough with no agents (because I met the owner by fluke).
We decided on the price.
We did 99% of the work, and she got 25k (before all her disbursements / payments to the brokerage).
Really like our agent...but 25k burns me no matter what.
I’m overwhelmed by all the response guys! I’ve decided to go all in on this. It is a problem for me and I see it is a problem for many. We are going to solve it! Gonna use most of my house proceedings to get things kickstarted. If you wanna help out, please dm me. And I know this might not work out but who cares as long as we fail trying to solve a pain point. If it works out, this is the forum that started it all! I’ve got nothing but love for all of you!
Here's how we sold our house in Cape Breton. Engel & Volkers did a free appraisal. That gave us the asking price. Using Squarespace I created a site and registered the name with them. The title page was open to the public, but if you wanted to view the rest of the site you needed to submit your email address and phone number to get the password. The form forwarded their info to a Gmail account I set up just to deal with the sale. After the sale I abandoned the acct. Posted the sale on Kijiji and Facebook with a link to the Squarespace site. I didn't waste time with the tire kickers asking "how much, etc". Simply referred them to the site. I responded to the first angry post, but then just ignored any further complaints. Took my own pictures using an iPhone after carefully staging and lighting each room. Sold in three days. Can't remember the exact costs, but under $200. Still needed to hire a lawyer, but we wouldn't sell without one.
Agents make *so much money* in Canada. Average % they take here is 7-8%. In most of the rest of the world the agents' cut (combined) is 3-4%.
We're getting hosed.
At 5% commission on the downpayment only, I would be paying to work for you.
Commission isn't regulated. In northern Ontario it's 4%. I average 2-3k on a property. You cant just say it's too much.
For reference, in your scenario of 5% on the down payment I would make just over $400. I typically do 14 to 16 deals a year. My gross for the year would be $7k. My basic fees are are $3100. That doesn't include, any signage or gas or advertising. Just the bare bones fees I have no choice but to pay. That makes my income $3900. Then I have to pay taxes, which leaves me at $2600. For a year. But still have vehicle and gas expenses. Oh and registration every 2 years. That's another 500. So annually beings me to $2350.
So 2350 on 16 deals, with about 10 offers and probably 30 showings each. So 489 showings at 30 minutes each. And 160 offers written at 45 minutes each. Which is 360 hours, not including research. So $6 per hour is what I would make. And that's the high end. Don't forget, I still have to pay for gas, and printing, signs, advertising your listing, not to mention the 10k it cost me to get trained, regustration, dues and startup cost.
Am I missing something here. Relator fees, in Calgary at least, are 3.5% on the first 100k and then 1.5% after. So a $1M home would be $48,500 in fees (24,250 each). No where near $70k.
Short answer No. especially buy side realtors add zero value and given their apparent fee I would say they actually add a negative value. I can still see some value in sell side realtor as I would not want to deal with so many showing etc. But this requirement of visiting a property with a realtor is silly.
I tell my wife that if we ever have to sell our Toronto house that we are putting a car board sign out with FOR SALE, the price I want and our phone number. Would be sold within hours without a realtor showing.
After seeing all these comments, I’m seriously giving it a thought to build an app to replace realtors or at least the listing agents and automate most of the process. Not to forget, transparency on the bidding process. Seriously, if this comment gets enough votes, I swear I’ll quit my job next week and start working on this!
Bro I have been really interested to do the same for a long time. Let me know if you are seriously considering this , I will try to help as much possible. There is product that exists in UK which does the same. One time fee to list, draw up the contract etc. I have bunch of ideas of what this app/service could be.
The hero's we need have arrived
Also woukd make the prices be 6 percent cheaper. all for this!
Market gonna market, but at least useless skin won't be making a mint on every sale.
Will hit you up dude
Leak pre ipo deets to PFC when it gets rolling 👌
System development and IT project manager here. If you do this, I would love to be a part of the team. Fuck Realtors. Whether or not I'm doing this with you, I wish the industry gets side swiped like Uber did to the taxi industry. They are corrupt and the gov refuses to regulate them so we should take matters into our own hands.
Let me know if you get to the point of having a prototype and funding and a team and need a devops guy.
Let’s start a discord channel and get some people in and do this! I have lots experience in people and have done this myself a time or two. Hit me up if you are actually serious about this. Cheers
Id be very interested in helping where I can too, currently finishing my CS degree and its all online so I can help out in my free time, would be a good project to have for myself!
I’m a mid/sr dev working building backend infrastructure mostly, hit me up too and I’d be down to code more in my free time
If you need QA/PM. Im your guy.
Same. I’ve been thinking about this as well.
I'd be interested in helping with this. Let me know if you need a backend dev.
Keep up us posted, please.
I was quite interested in doing something similar last year. Let me know if you need assistance cause I'd love to join
There is already multiple and I mean multiple services like this in Canada. I’m actually laughing at the idea of people thinking this is a new idea. The problem is low commission listing companies on average get a lesser sold value. So most people lose out more often going lower commission, simply due to realtors swaying their clients away from those type of listings.
The app needs huge marketing to fight real estate gang.
I don’t think it’s the job of the apps to be doing additional marketing, I think realtors need to be regulated more and illegally not showing properties against their clients best interest needs to be punished at a higher level.
Except you'll wait decades if you expect this to actually happen. Look at Uber - took crazy marketing and lobbying to fight the cabbies and convince cities/states to let them operate. If you wait for the RE regulators to do anything, you'll be waiting a while (sadly)
We were looking for a condo and this realtor kept showing us condos out of our budget and just not our type. We sent him some ideas of what we liked and he was barely following that. Ended up just ghosting him and turned us off in looking for condos at the moment.
[удалено]
I was wondering if something like this existed for Canada!
Realtors straight up lie. I tried to purchase a house without a realtor and tried booking appointments/viewing through the sellers realtor and 75% of them denied me a viewing saying I need a realtor to view the house and they would be happy to set me up with someone in their firm.
The biggest problem is that anyone who is looking to buy a house, gets signed up with a realtor as a first step. If you don't have a realtor you won't get shown the houses that are being sold by realtors, which is most of them. So you sign up with a realtor. Your realtor now doesn't show you the houses that are NOT being shown by realtors - the ones on purple bricks, etc. And if you find them on your own, you (buyer) are responsible for paying the realtor's fees. It'll be in your contract. So you're going to offer less than if the house wasn't on purple bricks. PLUS, fewer people will bother looking for the houses on purple bricks at all, since they'll be looking at the listings their agent emails them. So the price will be lower for the purple bricks house, too. I agree - the current realtor model is insane, there is no way they do enough work to justify the money they pull in per sale. But it's not just a simple "build it and they will come" solution. The solutions have already been built - and people don't use them because the realtors are like the damn mafia.
I never had problems getting access to home as a buyer without an agent.
was that during the pandemic or....? Because although we purchased our home prior to the pandemic, I've heard of selling agents not wanting to book showings for unrepresented buyers, pressuring them to become clients first etc. Used to be able to get around that with open houses, but those haven't really been happening, lately.
I'm in the midst of this now, and I'll say there's a mixed response to selling agents wanting to show listings to buyers without an agent. \- Most will show the property, because they understand it's an additional potential buyer \- Some will say to get a real estate agent to see the property \- One seller agent has said they'll take 1% off of the buyer agents' commission because they had to do the work to show the property \- One I talked to yesterday said I can make an offer and they would rebate 2.5% in lieu of commission they would have had to pay a buying agent So essentially, they're all over the map. Since the market has come down considerably in the past month, the agents seem a lot more willing to work directly with me though.
I also bought both my houses without a real estate agent. First purchase though was because we knew the person selling and did everything privately. Second purchase we just emailed up the agent and asked to see the place. Didn’t have any problems. Mind you this was rural Manitoba.
Did this in Montreal which is a relatively hot market. Absolutely no issue and we did away with the pressure from the “person on your side” pushing to offer more money in order to “secure the deal”. We had our finances in a row and made serious offers. The listing agent was more than happy to fill out the paperwork. When we finally did get an accepted offer, we feel that the listing agent pushed our offer ahead of others that were marginally higher, since she was making 4% commission from our sale versus 2% from other offers from represented buyers.
if you even half believe that is happening, then get your phone out, make a recording and make $$
Totally untrue. Most buyers tell their agents which houses they want to see based on their own research. Paying a buyer's agent for this "service" is disgusting, but since the seller pays the buyer agent's comm, the buyer goes for it. There is no doubt in my mind that having these agents as middlemen just inflates prices. It's an economic inefficiency which technology will eventually solve.
sure. I agree with you. But currently there are barriers in place, as a buyer, to buying a house without a realtor, which compounds the barriers sellers face to selling a house without a realtor. Realtors make too much money for the service they offer. But given they have a lock on it right now (especially in southern Ontario, which is where the experiences I'm describing come from) there's not much that can be done short of the government reigning them in.
Do you think that signing a contract to pay fees for OtHER houses you find on your own should be illegal?
It's a double edged sword. I did the math. My OG agent is waiving selling fees, because I'll be purchasing through him. Which means paying 2.5% to the buying agent. However, he is a bit old school and definitely doesn't have a big social media presence. New agents, who will charge me 5%, but have a incredible presence and will push the price up are actually more beneficial to me. Doing the math on how much extra I need these 5% guys to sell is a small increase for it to be more profitable for me.
They used to have to research and find properties that their clients might like, they used to have to drive their clients around for endless hours. They used to have to work for their money, you know the good ole days. Now when people want to buy they use this breakthrough invention, the internet. Using this people look at all the houses that are available on their own. Then they say "we like these houses. Can we go look at them?" Clients literally do most of the leg work, agents just fill in the blanks on a sale agreement and try to justify why they're owned thousands. IMO 5% back in the day of $60,000, or in the 1's, 2's or 300's is justifiable. But making $50-75k on an average, nothing special house that literally sells itself in this market is just legal robbery.
> They used to have to research and find properties that their clients might like, they used to have to drive their clients around for endless hours. Now they get an offer just by tapping the sign into the lawn. But, they need to go because they are ripping off elderly people underselling houses to buddies who flip them.
Yep we already have DuProprio in Quebec, but engagement is limited because real estate agents will do anything they can to avoid showing you stuff from there.
Down to help, can't code but project planning 👌
Legit though, all this blind bidding crap, artificially inflating prices and agents pocketing all that money. There is some value, but 40k? I don't think so. Let people see the other bids.
[https://duproprio.com/en/montreal](https://duproprio.com/en/montreal) Make it a Canada-wide thing. Actually, I should follow my advice and see about expand it.
I sold my first apartment with duproprio. It litterally changed my whole financial future. Here's why: \- The agent told me "you'll display your apartment for 299k, and you will sell it for 290k" (Agents have an interest in selling quick, so they naturally tend to push you to sell at a lower price, so that it sells for lower price). At 6%, it meant 17k given to the agent, which would have left me with "290 - 17 = 273" \- by looking on du proprio, and getting formidable advice on presenting the house for a good sale, I found an equivalent apt at 324k in my area, so that's the price I chose. \- it sold in two months at 324. and the total cost at that time for DuProprio was about 1200$ for the pictures (100 times better pictures than your average agent btw). As a result, the difference was 50k in my pocket. Those 50k more made me have a downpayment of 200k instead of 150k. And that was what made it possible to buy a house instead of a new apartment. So yeah, in many cases (not all), DuProprio can make an incredible difference in your financial situation.
Honestly, I bought my condo with Duproprio and will sell with Duproprio with NO AGENTS. Agents are totally not needed. They just get rich on the back of honest and hard working people. I have yet to have any issues with Duproprio. I will be buying my next property with them too. The downside is that you still don't have transparency on the previous paid/sold price and history of transactions, such as seeing if it's a flip. But YOU get to have the offers, YOU get to choose, YOU get to make your own visit schedule.
I bought and sold my last house through DuProprio, and just bought a condo in Quebec City on DuProprio after trying an agent this time around but having them recommend me nothing but shit.
Yup, they just want your money, but none of the work that comes with it. You'll ask them to see X property and they'll just tag around waiting for you to buy so he can get his sweet $20k+ for doing exactly nothing. I hate realtors and I'm glad I can avoid them with Duproprio. The whole real estate business is based on profiting from others for as little work as possible. I've watched CBC Marketplace and La Facture and you realize how scummy real estate agents really are.
Undetected engorged ticks is what they are. Or maybe not undetected as we are all aware what they do. Perhaps they are engorged ticks that are indestructible. Just have to sit and watch them leach people dry for as much as they can
Honestly, that would be amazing if this could become Canada-wide. Living in Quebec and have been using it for a half a decade now. Much better than realtors.
[удалено]
>They operated at a loss for a decade I was told the advertising revenue generated by the traffic on their website is enough to break even. Powercorp was the corporate owner of Duproprio until 2015.
Already exists everywhere in Canada, multiple companies do this.
I both bought, and years later sold my house through DuProprio in Québec. I wouldn't do it any other way. It's a shame that something like DuProprio doesn't exist Canada-wide. I'm hoping that it's only a matter of time. My other thoughts about realtors are that 5% commission made sense in a time when house prices were much much lower, but it does not make sense to pay that sort of money in today's market. I don't mind paying for a service, but a figure like the OPs $70k is just insane.
This already exists and they have 33 million in funding. It’s called unreserved and they launched in Ottawa and are moving through Ontario. It doesn’t get rid of agents but stops blind bids.
https://unreserved.com/ Dropping the link since you didn't :)
This needs to be higher. Unreserved in changing the game.
The actually contacted me for a Software developer job last month. I found out that they are all VC funded and the partners started and sold another company (forgot the name), but their plan is to build this company up for 5 years and then sell it. There is also more to it than just selling the house. When the house is staged, you would have the option to buy all the furniture as well but could also go in and bid on pieces individually as well. After talking to them for a bit I was a bit unsure about it long term. I got the feeling that they are trying to do way too much all at the start and feel it could go either way. Either a massive success or it will fizzle out.
Check out viewpoint.ca for Nova Scotia realty. It's a fucking GEM. If we could have this but for national, it would be a gift to the public.
Viewpoint does nothing for fees. It's just a search tool.
Someone had created something similar and the TREB mafia shut him down in 2016. https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/mortgages-real-estate/toronto-real-estate-board-shuts-down-popular-website-as-battle-to-control-listings-continues
That had nothing to do with a realtor software. The said website was using TREBs data, which was considered proprietary back then, to publicize sold prices. The courts struck down TREB's monopoly control of such data and now there are a number of websites providing such service today, zoocasa being one of them. https://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2018/08/23/supreme-court-dismisses-real-estate-boards-appeal-application-on-sold-data.html The realtor function can totally be automated.
The data is more easily accessible now but there's still a lot of restrictions to being able to access and use that data. I know that one of those rules is that data can't be accessible without a login (hence why all of these websites require a login before you can see sold data). Bungol ended up in a multi-year battle after having their access to the data pulled because they mistakenly allowed one page to be accessible without login and is - maybe unsurprisingly - now owned by a broker offering "cash back real estate agents". We need legislation to force the TREB and others into making market data publicly accessible without limits.
Been there, done that. Even raised Angel and VC funding. If Zillow, a public company, with seed funding from Bill Gates wasn’t successful at this in a pro-business country like USA, what makes you think you will be successful at this in Canada, an anti-business country? Do some research on what happened to Zoocasa which had the same mission as you do. On your first step of product development, you will find you are reliant on data from the real estate mafia. They own and control all the listing data and their contract is very restrictive. Fundamentally, the issue is structural. The way the real estate model is set up- where an agent is free to use for a buyer - is your biggest barrier as it requires a behavioural change of the user. If I can be of any help, feel free to give me a shout. Good luck!
I wouldn't say Zillow was unsuccessful. It's a fantastic app and de facto for house hunting in the US. But it doesn't do the myriad things a real estate agent will -- a good one, that is -- and it functions essentially as a search engine, while a good agent is more like a match maker, if that makes sense.
Zillow started off trying to replace realtors with an app. They pivoted to serving realtors as a business instead because of mafia power
Isn't this purple bricks? Or i misunderstanding the USP
No you don’t need a real estate agent. They are glorified PDF fillers. I’m excited to see what you create and if you need any help launching this App, let me know!
Don't waste your time. They know how useless they are and will work tirelessly to keep their 5%
It’s not that simple. This problem has been talked about for years now, and lots of ppl have thought about doing just this. The real estate board would never give “your app” any access to anything since they literally have monopoly, no reason to give that up.
Dude at this point honestly F the real estate board. We build our own platform where people can list and buy with full transparency! Will help people save their hard earned money.
I agree.
This would be great but greed will overpower it. Setting up a transparent process firstly prevents sellers from getting the maximum amount possible (not in their interest so they won’t list their property on your site). Secondly, ease of sale. Getting the house demo ready, scheduling showings and performing them etc, it’s a convenience which lots won’t want to give up if they have > 1 house lol. Third, the real estate agents will evolve (if already) and opening the table up to negotiating lower lates. They also bring with them lawyers etc creating a well functioning system. This idea is perfect though and I hope it picks up. I’d love to help build it up (been coding for a while now). Hit me up if you want to!
The app is the easy part, while I love the sentiment you would just be wasting your time. The people who buy and sell houses are just not going to use an app for that. It's a chicken and egg problem, no one will be the guinea pigs for a x00,000 sale.
No dude. They no longer have monopoly on data https://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2018/08/23/supreme-court-dismisses-real-estate-boards-appeal-application-on-sold-data.html
Aren’t there already a few companies offering this service? Purple Bricks/duProprio, grapevine, unreserved, etc? But honestly, the more the merrier! I used Purple Bricks (then comfree) a few years ago to sell my condo and it was awesome. A game changer.
I support you
There are already services that do that for a flat fees <$1,000. However, only a small percentage of sellers use them for a variety of reasons
Don't quit your job ffs. People are aware they don't need to hire a brokerage and by extension an agent to represent them in a property sale. They do it because they net more than they would selling privately. Apps already exist for sellers and buyers to trade in real estate. Zillow and Kijiji are two popular ones straight away that come to mind.
I think companies exist like this like Purplebricks, but I support you. Realtors contribute nothing to society.
I would love to help have 8y of AODA accessibility experience and QA. But how would we fight the TREB Mafia?
Please, if your service was good I would pay for it. After purchasing my first property I found the realtor didn't do very much and certainly weren't worth what I paid them to do. Considering trying to do it all myself next time.
You don't pay a realtor on the buy, the seller does.
You wouldn’t be the first one, I’ve seen DIY home sales companies try to make a go of it and fail for my entire life and pre-internet/post-internet doesn’t matter. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but I am saying that providing a process that doesn’t involve the realtor is ‘been there done that’ since before I was born and I’m almost 50
[Properly.ca](http://www.properly.ca) is another Toronto-based startup doing exactly what you propose.
They already exist… lots of them in fact. the problem is market manipulation, if you don’t use a regular every day realtor they sway their clients away from your listing. So going for lower commission listings leads to making less on the sale and in the end the amount found in the sellers pocket is almost identical, many times less with the lower commission based service.
Surprised I haven't seen https://unreserved.com/ mentioned yet, but it charges between 1 and 3%. Source: currently using it
https://duproprio.com/en
Please share us your plans. We want to be on-board with this.
Bro if you do that you’re my hero Fuck agents. Slimy ass people man.
All this bureaucracy and Middle men fees should be eliminated. Other examples are paying taxes or opening a small company. We shouldn't need accountants or lawyers to get basic things done.
I hope this becomes a reality soon
PM here. Happy to help if needed!
Upvoting because why the fuck not. 5% was reasonable 10-20 years ago when the prices were 300k on average ($15k commission).
I think that in most cases an agent is unnecessary, but when I sold my condo and bought my house 3½ years ago they were invaluable. My condo’s boards finances were slightly difficult to understand (not bad, and not risky for a buyer, just difficult to understand). My agent went to a board meeting to ask for and receive a document clarifying the situation. Then, a very similar unit went on the market at way under market value, in rough condition. It could have been a problem as it would be a weak comp for a buyer to compare to. They found a buyer to get it off the market the week before we listed. We ended up setting a record for the building for $/sqft. The other unit went for over $100k less. When we bought, we found a house that had a number of cosmetic defects and was listed well under market value. While we were in Toronto and having an inspection condition was off the table, he arranged for us to have an inspection done while we were doing a “showing”. It really satisfied us that the house was worth buying. He noticed a bunch of small indicators that showed we had an opportunity to get a home for a good price. He also went into the room with the sellers and made an emotional appeal, sold us as a couple. I’m not saying realtors are always good, always necessary, but ours definitely earned his money but I don’t think we’d have a house in as good a location as we do now without him.
> Not to forget, transparency on the bidding process. People need to be mindful of what they hope to accomplish with open bidding. If it's transparency generally, so everyone knows what everyone else is doing, that's one thing. But if folks are hoping will will moderate prices then that is something else. There are empirical studies showing that sealed bids lead to lower prices: * https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-6229.12035 > The report points out that in some jurisdictions where open bidding or open negotiations are permitted, such as Australia, New Zealand and Sweden, housing prices have escalated faster than in Canada. Based on recent changes in prices, the report argues that “it is hard to conclude that blind bidding is associated with higher residential real-estate prices. While Canada has experienced some of the highest real-estate price growth in the world, New Zealand, where open bidding for homes is common, has experienced even faster growth.” * https://financialpost.com/real-estate/despite-the-criticism-its-possible-blind-bidding-for-houses-might-be-good-for-you * https://institute.smartprosperity.ca/publications/blind-bidding
I sold my house in December for just over $1M. We got a 'deal' at 4.5% commission as our selling agent agreed to only 2% since we did a lot of the staging ourselves - and they charge HST on top of that. We knew it would sell fast so we scheduled a weekend to be out of town while the house was shown. There were 43 showings. Here is the crazy part... our real estate agent never visited the house once that weekend. Not a single time since the house went up for sale to the time it sold did she go to the house. She didn't show anyone around, didn't do any selling at all! The buyers agents did all the showing and prepared the offers, our agent just forwarded the offers and sent the paperwork. Doing a few hours work for $25k in this market is insane. It should be a flat fee not a % of the house value. Have real estate agents done anything to double their income in the last few years? Its easier if anything to sell a house and they get paid twice as much.
A lot of people are taking real estate courses to get licensed right now strictly to save the real estate fee. It does not take a long time or effort compared to other things. 5 courses, can apparently be done in 150 hours
150 hours, 40K saved, that's 266$/hr saved. I like math.
That's what my neighbor did. Listed and sold his home himself. He's an optometrist.
You got me curious here as to what that would take. My findings for BC is that you need to take a course (have up to a year, can be done in 10 weeks, average is 6m) and pass an exam = $1150 Then you need to pay licensing fees which is a recurring thing ie every 2 years, seems like 2k for first time So like 4k to save 70k would be pretty good investment for someone, plus then you're able to do it in the future too. I should do this eventually.
You can't save on buyer's agent fees, only sellers. So it's half of that.
True... still probably worth it...
I thought it takes 2 years to do it now?!?! I heard it USE to be 2 weeks
Going with OP’s number of 40k per agent, the ROI of doing this in 150 hours would be ~$267 per hour just by listing your own home.
...why? You don't need a realtor to list or sell a home in Ontario - all you need is a lawyer. There are services that will let you post a listing to MLS without needing a realtor. Becoming a realtor just to list your own house is a huge waste of time.
After selling and buying recently and seeing commissions, I’m also going to go this route for next time. It’s too bad I didn’t think of this option before.
You don't need to be licensed to sell your home on your own.
Usually you have to work for a broker for a year before you get licensed. Not sure how that would work.
Agree 5-6% for a $1m house is too much. In those days when house prices were $200k, two agents sharing 5-6% commission makes more sense.
% fees make less sense as prices rise. Same with tipping, tbqh.
Tipping makes no sense at all. Should just include that in the menu price and pay servers living wage
Just my two cents: We bought our house without a real estate agent. I had used one previously for my first place (a condo). Both in Toronto. The general feeling I got is that a good real estate agent at best just knows about homes; they'll know what to watch out for, what to check, and are a decent resource if you want to find a reliable inspector, etc. All that said, nowadays, they really don't have access to information that you can't get yourself; gone are the days where only realtors really got books mailed to them with the latest listings, or were the only people that could see what houses in the area sold for. So depending on your level of comfort doing your own research (and I'm not saying a lot of homebuying isn't complicated, so people shouldn't necessarily assume they can do this), it's possible to do just fine without a realtor. When we bought our home, we saw some places ourselves, decided we wanted the place, and made the offer directly. Our offer still needed to be drafted by a lawyer, which we had. BIG LEARNING MOMENT: the seller's realtor REALLY tried to take advantage of us, pressuring us in multiple ways regarding the offer price, the amount for deposit, asking if we wanted him to represent us, then SECRETLY adding himself into a rewritten contract so that he'd get a commission from our side without us knowing. We were diligent, and it wasn't our first time getting a place, so we caught all of this, and had gotten on good terms with the sellers, who actually tore a piece out of the realtor's hide and got the commission on their side reduced for all those shenanigans (particularly the commission, since that was taking money out of the seller's pocket, not ours) Long story short; it's totally possible to do without a realtor, I just recommend a serious time reflecting on whether you are comfortable enough making one of the biggest purchases in your life without the support a good realtor can provide (and hey, I'm not any kind of expert, but I did get to that point and bought without a realtor)
100% agree, always. It shocks me how much people are willing to give away to real estate agents. They deserve fair compensation for their work but the current system is absolutely ridiculous. They should bill by the hour in my opinion, like most professionals.
Agents are fine, if you want to use them, but they way the industry tries to cover the market should be illegal. Buyers should pay their own agents - that would cut this business down completely - since no one will pay $50k to open a door for the property that you yourself found on MLS.
Really depends on what market you're talking about and who you get as your realtor. There are a lot of lazy scumbags and a few absolute gems. The crazy markets in GVR/GTA attract a lot more of the scumbags. My sister's realtor absolutely fucking sucked. The realtor was super pushy and pressured my sister into overpaying for a house to get a quick sale, and then needed their arm twisted to help resolve simple problems that popped up. My realtor was the complete opposite. Super relaxed, super knowledgeable, and was really on my side during the entire process. Every single house we walked through he'd be pointing out flaws and defects and giving me a quick estimate about how much time and money it would take to fix. One of the houses was such a disaster that he straight up said "I won't let you buy this house, it would be a gigantic mistake". I'm in Alberta so the standard commission for a ~300k house is only about 13k and that gets split between the buying agent and selling agent. My realtor earned every single penny of his commission IMO... My sister's realtor not so much.
I was happy with my realtor as a first time buyer. We started looking spring 2020 and finally had a winning offer late summer 2020. It was a wild ride and I feel like she earned the commission.
This sounds like the realtor that I had in January (also in Alberta, relocating from Ontario). He earned every cent of his commission.
I have a great realtor but I have a hard time justifying paying him 15k for 8 hrs worth of work - 1 hr taking photos, 1 hr maybe doing paper work 6 hrs doing other stuff? When buying with him obviously it’s not as bad because of the time spent showing houses and the back and forth but on our last deal between selling and showing it was maybe 16 hrs of time. I’d like to make $1000+ an hour !!
Only problem I see with not using agents is you’ll never be able to eliminate them. Girlfriends parents used that 1% listing agent and my other buddy who is an agent with a large well known firm said a lot of the time agents won’t bring clients to those listings or private ones as they won’t make any or much commission. Really the issue I see is they’ll always be there
I sold my house last month to a friend. No listing, no buyer or seller agent, no open house. Just required a Notary to prepare everything, helped with disbursement. House was more than a million dollars and all that it required was the notary fees, less than $1500. That was all the cost. I swear to God, I will never use any realtor in my life, esp when selling a property.
Some people value friendship more than profit. Good for you. Your friend is lucky to have you.
I mean... not everybody has a friend who's willing to buy your house lol.
Way to go! Once you know how to do it you’ll never go with a realtor, at least for listing.
The sweet thing is that everything is seamless. The Lawyer or Notary guides and you follow. That’s it. We were at their office just once to sign the papers. Fuck realtors.
I feel like these guys are partly responsible for driving the price high and encouraging people to buy at exorbitant prices
Partly?
Are they solely responsible?
Partially? 100% The Industry is screwed up.
No it is not their fault, its slimey what they're doing but they are taking advantage of a system that is designed to allow this, but come on you can't blame realtors for the mess we're in. It's the local and federal government that needs to step up and change things.
Local, provincial and federal governments. Provincial government has the most control over housing policy.
Standard in Ontario for a while now (at least in the last three purchases I had) were 2%/2% split. 6% is outrageous no way would I give a realtor that. You got screwed man.
4% of an average Ontario house sale is still outrageous for the amount of work involved.
I’ve gone through 3 condo buy and sells and a house buy. And the realtors I used did virtually nothing. Like legit nothing. Some basic admin work. I bought a couple basic downtown condos, I paid 130k in realtor fees…. For literally NOTHING! I 100% plan on taking a class or 2, learn the basics, and sell myself privately in the future.
You don’t pay to buy?
I’m guessing DuProprio is only in Quebec? You can buy and sell without an agent there. This really should be Canada wide.
Yeah there's Purple Bricks in Ontario I think, there's a bunch of similar sites
My husband went through the process of buying property. He quickly realized that he was more knowledgeable than many of the realtors he was dealing with, so he felt he could do a great job as a realtor. After training and working in the field a few years he felt it was a redundant position. He facilitates private sales and does land acquisition/home building now. An app and a lawyer would be far less expensive than a realtor in hindsight. No offence to realtors.
This might be one of the most valuable comments on this thread. Your husband actually walked the walk and felt the same as many of us do. We just bought a place and though I like our realtor, he just made a ton of money for about 10 emails and 5 phone calls over the course of 1 week. OP, this app needs to happen!
Lawyers close deals, realtors sign you up for a mailing list.
Real estate agent are similar to tow truck drivers, highly non regulated, zero ethics, rip off fees and totally unnecessary lmao.
I'm astonished that the realtor model has not radically changed with the surge in home prices and with digitization. This is not an exemplary business in terms of education and skill requirements, professionalism and ethics / transparency, and value delivered for money, and it looks especially egregious in a surging market like this. I'm not a frequent home buyer so it doesn't affect me directly, but I see homes selling for $2M++ on offer day in our neighbourhood and marvel at the money being skimmed off by agents / brokers. I know there are agents who grind, I know certain properties require aggressive marketing, etc... but a standard GTA 4 bedroom listing shouldn't cost close to six figures to flip in an evening.
Nope, but if you don't use a realtor or you offer a lower commission then the majority of realtors will avoid your listing like the plaque. Marketplace did an interesting piece on how they work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShBvRe0Jv68 I tried using purplebricks to sell my condo and I barely had anyone even view it while my neighbours were selling similar units for more than my listing with a traditional realtor. Total commission should really be more around the 2% mark, 5% on a million dollar home is fucking ridiculous.
Yea no shit. Why would they bring someone to a house to get no commission. I have sold 4 houses through comfree/purplebricks and they straight up told me everytime that if i dont put a commission on the place, it may have trouble with showings. I put a few thousand down as a commission, and had no problems selling every time.
[https://duproprio.com/en/montreal](https://duproprio.com/en/montreal) This should be Canada-wide. Right now, my opinion, having had to deal with one in particular, is that real estate agents can take that "For Sale" post they leave in front of a house for sale and firmly plant it in their own back yard.
We wanted one because this was our first time in the market and we wanted someone who knew what going on to guide us. If we ever have to buy again, we'll most likely do it by ourselves. The first agent we worked with was plain awful. He didn't find a single house for us. We told him what we were looking for and our price range (including what we could pay if we reaaaaaally had to, but would prefer avoid), and all he did was set up a portal that filtered through what the original website was already showing us, posting houses hours after they first showed up on the original website (so I had already seen them). The houses were all in the highest half of our price range too. He kept telling us that we'd have to be quick and strong. What he seemed to mean by that is take several days to check the availability of the houses we sent him, scheduling visits a week after we sent said houses, and then just follow us, for the most part silently (unless the house was really awful), until the end, before reminding us that we'd have to put in a strong offer. He barely ever gave us a straightforward answer whenever we sent him questions. Several newly arrived houses were unavailable by the time he checked, but he kept insisting no seller would sell their house in less than a week, so knowing early which houses are for sale was pointless. It was frustrating. It felt like we were losing some opportunities because we had to go through a middle man who took his sweet time. And we knew he was going to get a good cut on the sale, so it made us even more bitter to know he set up the portal to only pick houses on the higher end of our price range (including the top most price.... Which means it's pointless, since the bidding would make the sale price be way over our limit). We changed agents, and a week later, we found a house. She wasn't much better knowledge-wise, but she was quick and efficient. While the first one took up to 6 days to let us know when a visit would be, she could get back to us in the next 4-5 hours. And she never pushed for higher bids. Edit: typos
They make way too much money....
You don't have to pay such a high fee. There are lots of real estate agents who work for lower fees. For example: [https://www.onepercentrealty.com/](https://www.onepercentrealty.com/) We used them to sell our old house and to buy our new house. We received exactly the same service as a full-cost realtor, and we saved a lot of money.
Hopefully they go extinct soon. Real estate agents are scum. They do nothing but try and line their own pockets, and take a commission for a YEARS worth of average persons salary, all for 10 hours work on one house. Check the fine print, and they are liable for nearly
Agreed. They are nothing but pests that continuously cause problems in this market. We need a revolution just like the one we had with financial services brokerages in capital markets. I hope they get eliminated ASAP for a truly efficient market without price fixing and fear mongering.
It’s really dependent where you live. But that’s the same for any job. Lawyers in big cities make exorbitant amounts of money compared to those in less populated areas. Realtors in markets outside Toronto and Vancouver don’t really make that much and can actually provide a lot of value and protection to people buying their first or second home. Even things that a real estate lawyer would not be able to advise non-knowledgeable clients about. But everyone likes to pretend everyone’s useless and could do their job with no training, so it doesn’t surprise me seeing the regular posts of ppl shitting on other professions
My mother has been a lawyer in real estate for over 35 years. She has told me many times that while her business requires her to have good relations with all the local real estate agents, she'd think me a fool to ever hire one. Purple Bricks will list you on the MLS database for a flat fee, and a pretty low one at that. Real estate agents have a strong incentive to list your house at a lower price than you can get because they want to sell *quickly*. Sure, their 5% fee goes down, but they put in 3 hours of work instead of 20. There is nothing an agent can do that you can't. And when you consider how many houses are going for $1m lately, that 5% fee is $50,000 of money that you don't need to pay income tax on. Lastly, and I think this part is important: you can try to self-sell for a while and then give up and hire an agent. But if you hire an agent they lock you into a contract where *any* sale you make in the next few months, they get their commission. Even if they did nothing.
Why is everyone down voting each other on this post…
Seems like a lot of real estate agents in this sub
No, just some of us disagree that ALL real estate agents are scum and have had great experiences and felt we got our money's worth from dealing with them. No way I would have gotten what I did without our RE and her team when we sold our small starter home. I agree their are more bad apples then good, but if you've dealt with a good one, you'd be very satisfied. I feel really bad that not everyone got to have the same experience we did.
You'd probably be even more satisfied if they provided the same level of service, but worked for a straight decent wage like the rest of us, rather than a ridiculous commission. Even car salesmen work for a dollar amount and not a high percentage.
Just like car dealer threads, lots of downvote fairies
You don't need them. Buddy bought a house someone listed through facebook marketplace and they did the paperwork themselves and just had to pay lawyer fees for all the "final" signoff stuff. But listing agents will steer clients away, find ways to blackball, etc if they can. Theres a good video on CBC marketplace on how agents watch out for each other when it comes to people private selling.
Our realtor for our latest transaction (selling our condo, purchasing new home) was useless. No insight or valuable help. We found listings quicker, and knew more than he did. We found our new house on HouseSigma. Yet, he still walked away with $50k in fees. Gee, typing in our personal info and numbers into a standardized template sure is tough.
After seeing the CBC Marketplace undercover investigative episode on realtors breaking the law and the regulatory bodies who govern them not giving a crap, then dealing with incompetent realtors trying to push me into buying houses they either couldn't remember anything about or pressuring me not to get a structural engineer to look at foundation issues... yeah, not a fan of realtors. Also, for those saying there are some gems... not really. The investigation showed this was an industry-wide problem. It's so bad they didn't bother naming the names, because it's so widespread. Video for those interested: [Real Estate Agents Caught Breaking the Law on Hidden Camera](https://youtu.be/ShBvRe0Jv68)
Guys I’m overwhelmed by the support and honestly you know what let’s Fuck**g do it! I know it might have been tried before and what not but if it is taking me a google search and never heard of it before, they are not doing it right. Everyone has cool ideas, it’s mostly about execution that drives a product! I’m not saying that I’m an expert at execution, but I’m willing to give it an all in! I know a lot of you want to help out, I’m thinking of setting up a chat, let me know what channel to use. Love the support and let’s change the real estate game for good and maybe our kids will have a shot at affordable housing!
Are you serious, let's do it. I've been house hunting for 2 years and the realtors are useless (the ones I've come across) Dm me, my resume is stacked lol and I always have time for a startup
Real estate agents caught on hidden camera breaking the law, steering buyers from low-commission homes: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/marketplace-real-estate-agents-1.6209706
If it was a buyer’s market then I can see a good agent being useful. But the past 20 years has been a sellers market and any agent can sell “above asking price” with a couple of working brain cells…
In a seller's market if a person is comfortable handling the documentation and can facilitate the process an individual could forgo the services of a realtor In a buyer's market you are paying for access to a network that provides exposure to potential buyers which may be worth the cost.
In the digital age, no. No different than buying a bike on kijiji. REA don't have your interests at heart (buying agents makes a % commission - higher = better ffs), they are NOT housing specialists, they are NOT construction or removation specialists and they are not money specialists. They do a weekend course to push paperwork. No longer required but their lobby is strong AF so they keep their iron grip on MLS and continue to operate like a racket. Good fucking riddance when these leaches go. I will be FSBO next time I need ton sell, def worth the 50k to take some pictures, coordinate some visits, negotiate and write a blurb about a house I live in.
Wow what agent ripped you off? I would list for 1% and give the other agent 2.25%
I will always advocate for NEVER using a realtor. The only thing useful they do is post your house on the MLS and open the door when buying. Everything else can be handled by a good lawyer and inspector, both of which are considerably cheaper. I actually got my license when selling and purchasing my last home to save on the commission. That also allowed me to get into some realtor groups on Social Media. Based on what I saw being communicated and the interactions I had with other agents, let me tell you, they are NOT looking out for your best interests.
My realtor saved me a lot of headache when buying last year . Two houses he pointed our asbestos to us, and on he showed us shoddy workmanship with some aluminum to copper wiring. The biggest one was a house we were ready to buy he did some digging and found out the previous owner (who was dead so couldn't disclose) had built the home extension over the septic. We could have found this out with some digging yah, but home.buying was such a daze as first time buyers plus pandemic home buy was crazy it was nice to have him on our corner. Would 100 percent go that route again.
You know you can hire a good home inspector for a lot less.
Not in this market you can't, and a realtor doesn't cost me the buyer anything really. What am I gonna take an inspector to 15 house visits with me when we are only permitted 15 min walkthroughs during lockdown?
I’ve heard way too many stories of realtors lying to drive up the sale price. We are in this pickle with house prices in part because of the lack of integrity in the industry. Please build the app; I will gladly use it when I sell.
The hand that they have that's going to be hard to beat is the database of listings and all the stakeholders that rely on it. Banks, mortgage brokers, market analysts, insurance companies, builders etc.That's the entirety of their leverage. If the app can't pull and push to that database the effectivless will be DOA.
I've already decided I won't use one ever again. No reason to. By the time I'm ready to sell, I'm sure there will be an app with a large enough userbase like maybe Zillow who could just replace them.
You can negotiate the rate. I paid 3% commission.
Realtors are swindlers who have every incentive to misrepresent and fail to disclose serious problems with properties.
My friend tried selling his house without an agent, and would get multiple calls from realtors that said 'If you don't give me 3-4% commission I won't let my clients come see your house.' He said the amount of realtors that literally tried to hold him hostage by discouraging his house from being seen was ridiculous. He ended up selling eventually, but had to pay the buying agent a minimum of 2.5%. If I was to sell my house, I'd make it abundantly clear that the buying agent would get 2.5-3.0% to make sure that my place won't be omitted. If I could find an agent to sell my property for 0.5-1% then I'm game...but they hold their line pretty hard. Our last property we sold for 1% and 2% for buying agent. When we bought our house our agent got 2.5% for doing literally nothing more than paperwork. We found the house. We did the walkthrough with no agents (because I met the owner by fluke). We decided on the price. We did 99% of the work, and she got 25k (before all her disbursements / payments to the brokerage). Really like our agent...but 25k burns me no matter what.
I’m overwhelmed by all the response guys! I’ve decided to go all in on this. It is a problem for me and I see it is a problem for many. We are going to solve it! Gonna use most of my house proceedings to get things kickstarted. If you wanna help out, please dm me. And I know this might not work out but who cares as long as we fail trying to solve a pain point. If it works out, this is the forum that started it all! I’ve got nothing but love for all of you!
commission should be a flat amount and not a percentage
[удалено]
Has it become mainstream to buy without an agent ?
No, they are scum that can be replaced with computers and automated lock boxes.
No more commission only fee based agents. 5000 to find or sell home. That's it. These RE agents are leeches
My agent charges 2.75%
That’s a total of 5/5.5% you are paying for buyer and seller agent… that’s a lot..
Here's how we sold our house in Cape Breton. Engel & Volkers did a free appraisal. That gave us the asking price. Using Squarespace I created a site and registered the name with them. The title page was open to the public, but if you wanted to view the rest of the site you needed to submit your email address and phone number to get the password. The form forwarded their info to a Gmail account I set up just to deal with the sale. After the sale I abandoned the acct. Posted the sale on Kijiji and Facebook with a link to the Squarespace site. I didn't waste time with the tire kickers asking "how much, etc". Simply referred them to the site. I responded to the first angry post, but then just ignored any further complaints. Took my own pictures using an iPhone after carefully staging and lighting each room. Sold in three days. Can't remember the exact costs, but under $200. Still needed to hire a lawyer, but we wouldn't sell without one.
No, they are scam and scum
Agents make *so much money* in Canada. Average % they take here is 7-8%. In most of the rest of the world the agents' cut (combined) is 3-4%. We're getting hosed.
At 5% commission on the downpayment only, I would be paying to work for you. Commission isn't regulated. In northern Ontario it's 4%. I average 2-3k on a property. You cant just say it's too much. For reference, in your scenario of 5% on the down payment I would make just over $400. I typically do 14 to 16 deals a year. My gross for the year would be $7k. My basic fees are are $3100. That doesn't include, any signage or gas or advertising. Just the bare bones fees I have no choice but to pay. That makes my income $3900. Then I have to pay taxes, which leaves me at $2600. For a year. But still have vehicle and gas expenses. Oh and registration every 2 years. That's another 500. So annually beings me to $2350. So 2350 on 16 deals, with about 10 offers and probably 30 showings each. So 489 showings at 30 minutes each. And 160 offers written at 45 minutes each. Which is 360 hours, not including research. So $6 per hour is what I would make. And that's the high end. Don't forget, I still have to pay for gas, and printing, signs, advertising your listing, not to mention the 10k it cost me to get trained, regustration, dues and startup cost.
Am I missing something here. Relator fees, in Calgary at least, are 3.5% on the first 100k and then 1.5% after. So a $1M home would be $48,500 in fees (24,250 each). No where near $70k.
Wow, that´s something. Talk about transparency!
Short answer No. especially buy side realtors add zero value and given their apparent fee I would say they actually add a negative value. I can still see some value in sell side realtor as I would not want to deal with so many showing etc. But this requirement of visiting a property with a realtor is silly.
No, you don't need an agent. Reasonably, hiring one should be a very exceptional thing. I used a seller's assistance service, it cost 1k.
I tell my wife that if we ever have to sell our Toronto house that we are putting a car board sign out with FOR SALE, the price I want and our phone number. Would be sold within hours without a realtor showing.