"KP: Is it important for you that the photos actually originate from real estate marketplaces? If so, how do you verify their origin?
AD: Yes, that’s actually really important, otherwise the blog is just unverifiable user-generated content. If an image is submitted without a link, or no agent’s logo on the image, or I can’t find the source online, I tend not to use it. I’m sent lots of images taken by agents of something funny or shocking they’ve seen in a property that day, but if the image hasn’t been taken for the purposes of marketing the house, I don’t use it."
This is incredible given some of the listings. The fact one of the pictures is the house on literal fire, coupled with this context, goes to show that some people really don't belong anywhere in marketing or sales.
Our old house had problems. When we listed it, the best prospect thought we were stupid not honest, so he kept trying to get us to lower the price when inspection turned something up. In retrospect maybe a picture with the proverbial roof on fire might have been a good idea.
Here's the thing about getting a house loan: If you try to buy a house for too far under or over market value and can't explain why it's that far under market value, it sets off all sorts of red flags for lenders. Before we bought that house we passed on another because it was a unicorn in its neighborhood and our agent was having a terrible time coming up with documentation of comparable listings in a reasonable distance from the house. And then I discovered water damage and we bailed.
If you buy it for 15% under market and have a bunch of inspections that say why, that's less of a problem.
In New Zealand, houses can be sold “as is” which means cash only. It usually means that insurance cannot be acquired for the house, and mortgages always require insurance. It means there are bargains still available in my city (Christchurch) because there were so many houses damaged by the earthquake a decade ago. There are still houses that are about 2/3 the price compared to similar insurable houses. Few people can buy the as-is properties because most people need a mortgage to buy a house. People with cash usually buy better houses. A saw an as-is sold the other day to a buyer from the US.
Insurance policies have some queer rules that all insurers share - perhaps due to building code, or maybe due to a common reinsurer?
Your floor cannot have more than 50mm (two inches) drop between two corners of the house, as it can’t be insured. Unless you can show the unlevel floor existed pre-earthquake, in which case you can get insurance! Wierd.
All used homes in the US are sold “as-is”. It’s caveat emptor doctrine.
Now, there are laws against misrepresentation. There is a disclosure form that is required which asks you about defects. The seller can admit them or decline to answer, but if the seller knowingly lies about a property defect you can sue to recover damages.
Real estate agents have a lot of liability here because they are bound to disclose things that could have been “reasonably known” - which is a definition that can be tortured in every direction. For example, bedrooms: in my state a bedroom must have a closet to count as a bedroom. Except sometimes it doesn’t have to have a closet to count as a bedroom. The exceptions are literally described as “some older homes had bedrooms without closets” - but “older” and “bedrooms” is left to the interpretation of your legal council and the investigator when it becomes an issue.
> The pair - natives of North Manchester in the United Kingdom who now live in Houston, Texas with their three children - had been searching for homes near Nashville, Tennessee when they came across the property.
Why is the BBC clarifying what country Manchester is in but omitting where Tennessee is? Very strange for a British publication.
Its meaning outside of taxes is something which has dropped to zero value. So if you damage your car beyond repair, for example, that would be a "write off". It means it's not worth the repair costs because it's cheaper to buy a new one.
Right. What it doesn't mean is that the thing being written off is valueless, though. I've seen several perfectly safe and drivable cars written off because of cosmetic damage that would have cost more to fix than the car was worth. But the cars were otherwise fine.
Except this part:
> because it's cheaper to buy a new one.
is not true. A write-off is because the repairs exceed the fair market value of the thing being written off. But the thing is used, not new. The fair market value is likely to be well below the cost of replacing it with something new.
> It means it's not worth the repair costs because it's cheaper to buy a new one.
No, it just means insurers are assholes rigging the game.
A simple example: my personal MacBook broke. MacBooks are written off in 5 years. My insurer only wants to pay the surplus value (€200).
I tell them okay, instead of the €200 find me a replacement MacBook of the same model and year with approximately the same config. “Sorry sir we don’t do that.”
Okay, do they think I can find the same MacBook for €200? “Probably not sir..”
Nah, whoever chose that photo knew exactly what they were doing - they chose a photo that will appeal to their target market, which is people looking to get deal on buying a house that they will repair and flip for a profit.
The picture simultaneously shows that it is a nice, stately house, and also that it suffered significant damage which it needs to be repaired. It's the perfect choice.
There is zero chance that anyone in the market for a house in general would choose to buy this one, so there's no point in choosing a pretty picture which hides the damage. You'd just be wasting your time and that of your potential customers.
IIRC that's not a flip house. That's in a wealthy, desirable area and what is really being sold is the land. It's not nearly affordable enough to make flipping a good business plan.
This was my initial impression to, but up-thread there’s a link to an article about the buyers. Tl;dr they are wealthy, wanted a house in the area, and are “super stoked” to rebuild it and live there forever.
The worst ones aren't the funny ones where the homeowners have terrible taste, or the one on fire which was brilliant marketing for a home nobody was going to buy under the assumption it hadn't been on fire.
The worst ones are the subtly bad ones that just manage to make perfectly adequate rooms look much dingier or more cramped than they actually are because they settled for the first cheap snap they could manage without caring at all about the lack of lighting and didn't even move stuff like clothes drying racks that fill up floor area.
There's a particular flat I might actually consider buying that's on the market for a third less than the identical flat upstairs for over a year without selling. One of those listings has a "view" photo that shows extensive river estuary views on a sunny day. The other has the basically identical view on a day so wet and grey all you can see is the road and warehouse roofs.
It’s a great excuse and the price is usually right to rebuild to your taste. Almost all new construction happens in areas that are newly developed. It’s cheaper to rebuild these houses than to tear down one that’s sold for a price that includes the structure.
Isn't the damage from the fire trucks' water worse than the fire damage ? It's like the whole house going through a very long car wash. Wood, electricity must be wrecked.
That much damage means it's getting gutted to the structure to be repaired anyway. And wood is pretty much impervious to water, especially a one-time thing like a drenching from a fire truck. We build houses in pouring rain all the time, it's not a big deal. Sometimes it adds a week or so to the build time, but frequently it has no effect at all.
Not exactly the same but close. There was a listing a couple blocks away from my current house. Nice brick colonial. Listing said "completely renovated". The exterior had been painted. In zillow, you can click a "see it in Street View which I did. The image was of a house gutted by a fire. I remember thinking "how could the listing agent not notice that?" and then "Perhaps there's nothing they can do in Zillow to turn off that feature". Well, the following week the Street View images had been updated. Which resulted in me wondering if there's a special Google hotline to request a driveby.
Man, that's actually pretty fascinating - to watch that then the 10th video in the series (from a month ago) where the roof is getting shingled. I'm usually turned off by the "broadcast yourself" lifestyle but I'll admit this one is pretty cool.
I don’t know what compels people to live in these McMansions. Perceived status? Second vacation home? Fuck you money?
American lifestyle is so wasteful. It’s disgusting. Climate change is impacting everyone and these rich assholes continue to waste resources on shit like this.
> The fact one of the pictures is the house on literal fire, coupled with this context, goes to show that some people really don't belong anywhere in marketing or sales.
Namely, honest people who aren't total shitbags always trying to put one over on their fellow human beings for profit.
When I see something like that I just assume the realtor knows they’ve been handed a dud listing and is expending as little effort on it as they possibly can.
With my parents we rented a house once in Italy. There were two ponies in the garden, they just walked all over the house whenever they wanted to. There was one in the kitchen most of the time. In the early-mid 80's people just accepted whatever (as my parents did, after driving 4000Km there and back with my dad chain smoking in the car and us kids in the back not wearing seat belts). The whole experience involved breaking at least half a dozen laws & regulations.
I like that they try to authenticate the photos as being from actual listings. Of course people could generate crazy photos. These are kind of just slightly bad, which makes it interesting. Also, I think the captions add a lot.
It sounds like they accept submissions, since they rarely put up photos that don't have links to the actual real estate listing the pictures comes from.
An acquaintance of mine is an FBI investigator and moonlights as a higher-grade Realtor.
He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.
One day he uploaded the entire contents of the memory card to the MLS on one of his public listings, surveillance photos and all. I'm pretty sure everything was up for a few days before being cleaned up.
It's been years but I still haven't made up my mind on whether that makes him a worse agent of law enforcement or real estate.
I err to the side of incompetence, but want to believe it was a deep cover op to penetrate an enemy org by making them think he was compromised and had to act as a double agent, immediately rendering him a triple agent on behalf of the FBI...
The entire scenario is pretty unbelievable, and played out like an awful Adam Sandler movie. If I hadn't witnessed it with my own eyes, I would have trouble believing someone with dueling top credentials such as his could possibly be such an idiot.
I mean to say that among Realtors he was pretty elite, whatever that means. Put another way, he dealt in million dollar listings, not just average family homes.
It's possible that his connections and encounters from his work as an agent formed the foundation of his 'book' - and being a real estate agent is like 99% about building that book and 1% about doing things the rest of us might refer to as "work". Many if not most of the successful agents I know are moonlighters for this very reason.
Not ragging on real estate agents, it's not an easy thing to pull off; convincing someone to hand you 3-6% of the biggest financial transaction they've ever made just for you to negotiate for what's probably a grand total of a few hours and do some online shopping. And they do provide value insofar as knowing the landscape can really help a client avoid getting bent over a barrel.
Source: did it myself (poorly, which is why I'm in tech).
Yeah, I know right? And the higher end you go has nothing to do with any competence - your clientele becomes more and more like the fucktards that bought into SBF.
He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.
This really surprises me.
I would have assumed that an FBI memory card used for taking surveillance photos would have all kinds of security and encryption on it for chain-of-custody purposes. Otherwise, the photos won't stand up in court.
The healthcare company I work for has cameras it uses for photos, and for HIPAA reasons those cards are encrypted and secured. They won't even mount on an unauthorized computer.
Why would you say it wouldn't stand up in court? As long as the agent shows up to say, "Yes, I took these photos of real things that happened," that strikes me as the heart of the evidence.
Because companies like Canon sell multi-thousand dollar cameras and attachments to police agencies that are designed to make sure photographs can't be tampered with so that they're admissible in court. There can't be the possibility that a rogue cop altered a photograph, or the case can get thrown out.
It's why the cameras police departments use cost 5x more than the consumer versions.
I'm not sure "government agency buys expensive thing" is proof of actual need of said expensive thing. And even if it were, it's not clear to me that the need applies in this case.
I would have expected his job have guardrails in place to prevent this sort of mishap, like a full audit log and chain of custody of all evidence gathered during these investigations, as well as SOPs on the handling and storage of such evidence.
Physical evidence is perhaps handled with a greater regard, but from what I understand, background info gathered during surveillance isn't always intended for use in court and often really only serves to further the investigation itself. Usually a stakeout is gathering enough probable cause to effectively justify requesting search warrants, which is when the "real" investigation kicks off.
My shared connection to the Realtor dope I wrote about originally is someone I'm quite close to, and through them I've learned some pretty alarming realities of law enforcement.
It seems like the higher up the chain you look, the more indifference or incompetence you find.
> It seems like the higher up the chain you look, the more indifference or incompetence you find.
Well, let's say, you have a really competent investigator. Is that the person you want to be promoted into a position where they are not doing any investigating anymore? In that light it's good to have the incompetent higher up so that the people doing the real work are those that are competent. :)
No, it's a very practical combination. Let's say you're investigating a murder, talking to the wife of the victim: "I'm sorry for your loss. Is there anything else you can tell us about what happened? And I can totally understand if you can't bear to live alone in this crime scene any more. In fact, if you want to move out, I know someone who would be interested."
That's how all photos should be - original, no editing, no staging; If I want excitment, I can Prompt a Generative-AI platform to create mind-bendingly-creative imagery.
I've wasted so many days viewing flats/apartments because the Photos looked amazing, and the actual property was utterly awful.
issues:
- narrow/steep Staircases
- very old photos (now the place a dump)
- fish-eye lenses (or similar) enlarging the space
- etc etc et bloody cetera :(
The second one is the fake bookshelves one (at least for me). I think that the house really has been lived in with that hideous wall.
But yes there are plenty of bad staging photos, and at least one totally ridiculous photoshop (the sofa planted completely out of perpective and in front of a mirror that ought to be reflecting it).
I think the fake white bookshelf wallpaper has a certain aesthetic about it. I would like it in an AirBnB type of place, but definitely not in my own house.
I would also want it to actually fit on the wall and not be awkwardly cut off on the right edge.
To be honest I was just joking/thought for a second and decided that 28mm probably sounds right: 16mm would be useful (would show a lot) but also deceptive (too wide), and anything more than 28mm like 35mm or 50mm would be too narrow for capturing a space.
In my opinion, if anything, what makes these pictures less than ideal is the property itself which has nothing to do with the real estate agent. It's actually a net positive for potential buyers seeing all aspect of the object - what else should the agent do, hide unfortunate corners? Right, like anyone who actually cares to go and look at the property before buying it (so almost everyone) would not see these things anyway at inspection time.
What I am used to in the area I currently live in, is much, much worse - and actual incompetence on the side of the agent. And what's worse, you see it all the time! Here are a few highlights:
- A total of five pictures for the property, all of which are of the outside, none of the rooms.
- Blurry pictures as if someone first had to learn not to move the camera in the middle of taking a shot.
- Severely tilted pictures, as if taken on a boat.
- Three pictures of some door (the same door each time, mind you)
- ...
You might think this is a joke, and I wish it was. Unfortunately, though, this kind of thing is commonly found on real estate websites where I live. I don't know how anyone can ever get traction - I guess it must be a seller's market.
I'm not sure we're looking at the same photos... for some of them, sure, you're right. But many are bad photos like those you mention, except more egregious (hence they deserve the place on that site). The "garden" in one picture is rather awful, but why put that plastic chair facing against the wall to make it creepy on top of that? Why take a picture half naked (or not half - thankfully we'll never know) in front of a mirror? Why the cheap Christmas tree? Why those two sad soft toys in the corner of an empty room? Why a mower in the living room? Why include an old man watching TV in your photo?
As for the points you say, I'm not into real estate, I think often it comes down to limitations from reality. You know, actual _people_ live in those apartments you're trying to have pictures of. Maybe they'll just deny you entry (it's their place, after all, they might be renting and thus not give a damn about you willing to sell the property), in which case all you have to show is pictures from the outside. Or they might only agree to send you pictures themselves, in which case blurry pictures is all you get.
Of course, in general it's mostly incompetence, but hey, if everybody were perfect at their job the world would look totally different, in more important sectors than real estate...
When my sister bought her house, she felt like the current owners were actively trying to make it unappealing. Weird photos (not as bad as these, mind), staying home during open house, etc.
Turns out, the wife was trying to make it unappealing. She didn't want to move, but her husband did. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was the case in at least some of these photos.
> You might think this is a joke, and I wish it was. Unfortunately, though, this kind of thing is commonly found on real estate websites
The 2021 ad for our current rental had 1 interior picture. It was an old crayon drawing on wrinkled paper. The listing got 50 applications in the 2 hours it was up.
In that market, an ad that said nothing but 'Rental Available' would have been flooded with applications - every day.
It's less awful now. Many people have transitioned to homelessness and the rental market has eased up a little bit.
Yeah, or they just reuse the photos from a listing in the early 2000s, which is the lowest res camera phone picture. Seriously? just go to the property and snap a few pics with your phone.
When I moved to Seattle back in 2011 and was looking for a place to rent, I noticed that almost all the photos across multiple listings looked like they were paintings or architectural renderings or something. I could not figure out what was off about them.
A friend pointed out that the lighting was off because every single one was photoshopped with one of a few pictures of a sunny blue sky with just a few clouds in the background, despite likely having been taken on a grey, fully cloudy day.
FWIW: NWMLS will fine agents if the photos have been “too” doctored… adding some blue sky is generally considered ok, but anything that hides a material defect or camouflages the actual attributes of the house is a no no.
Does photoshopping furniture all over the flooring and walls count? I've seen plenty of that, seems standard actually since now you don't need to pay for staging.
Digital staging always looks a little off though. Also, open houses. If planning on an open house, which can be very beneficial, paying for staging may be worth it. Was for me at least.
Depends on the market, but in hot demand markets I'm sure its not necessary at all when you are getting 10 offers over ask sight unseen and sales with no inspections.
Finally, somewhere to share my a list of dubious property listings! In Norway agents hire house stylists to make a house look good. Airbeds dressed up to look like somebody just got up, magazine pictures on the wall, etc... often to a farcical level in a rundown house.
I viscerally dislike McMansion Hell. It's so mean-spirited and snobbish. People build themselves homes in the suburbs for their families to live comfortably and safely, and some jerks on the internet act all superior about how they have better taste. It sucks.
Kate Wagner does a fanastic job of distilling the history and language and sensibilities of architecture down into something that anybody can appreciate.
And quite the opposite of snobbish, she presents her critiques in a raw, geeky, low-brow format that would probably feel at home on 4chan or SomethingAwful.
She is not knocking down regular suburban homes and families -- she critiques the top few percent who live in ostentatiously monstrous homes.
If the design goals for the houses presented on McMansion Hell were simply that - comfort and safety - I'd have to agree with your assessment. But houses appear there because they seemingly have one over-arching design goal which is to appear impressive and thereby signal the owner's wealth. Most of the content points to the sheer purposelessness of certain architectural features, highlighting the owner's need for recognition over utility.
McMansions are a symptom of wanting to appear rich, they're expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as something built with an architect aiming for taste.
> ... or their families to live comfortably and safely, ...
Well, it is safe-ish, in that street crime is usually not too high.
But living in car-centric suburbs, with a lack of common, public spaces and physical and social isolation isn't really comfortable, or that good for your mental and emotional health.
The parts that make them bad are mostly about trying to make the houses look (even) bigger than they are, and making them look fancier than they are as cheaply as possible.
That kind of inept, absurd pretension is a recipe for comedy.
I love McMansion Hell. It’s hilarious and I’ve learned from it. People with atrocious taste and enough money to impose it on the world should be exposed to ridicule.
The British seem to have a well-established culture of "taking the piss" out of one's superiors, whereas the US seems to have zero tolerance for biting the hands of the corporate overlords who feed us.
I'm saying that as a Canadian who is exposed to both cultures. Also sorry.
McMansion Hell isn't about taking the piss out of one's superiors, it's about looking down on the lower classes without the refined architectural taste of the author and audience.
Have you actually visited the McMansion Hell website? It is literally the exact opposite of what you are describing.
It's looking down on people with >million-dollar, ten-thousand square foot homes that are also designed and decorated in an ugly and/or antiquated manner.
And the author is never shy to admit her own low-key low-brow style preferences; I don't sense any refined/pretentious vibes at all.
Possibly. But I also tend to think that the idea is to mock the tastelessness of new money, but not, the more educated and refined tastes of old money families.
Well, yeah. The nouveau riche are targets, because they're scorned by both the people without money, and by people with money. Combined with a combination of insecurity about their newfound wealth, and a lack of the cultural norms and social ties that old money has, and hilarity ensues.
Yes. But I think there is something problematic about that, in of itself. Old money isn't any more acceptable just because they (supposedly) have better aesthetics. In fact, on the face of it, there is a lot to congratulate the nouveau rich, relative to old money, don't you think? In most cases, they worked for it.
I don’t see how you could describe it that way. He’s not ridiculing poor people. His target houses are usually fantastically opulent, selling for well over a million dollars. It’s the same genre as publishing pictures of Donald Trump’s gold plated bathrooms.
In fact, the article you posted here traffics to a large extent, with either implied or explicit ridicule, in the attempts of what look like struggling and desperate people to sell their neglected properties.
One should not laugh at people with bad taste. It’s bad taste combined with power and money (Trump: a convenient example) where the lack of taste makes the world uglier, because it’s jammed into the public eye.
It's a lot of work to visit a house you might want to buy, but there's about 0 percent chance you buy one without doing so. So the agent must optimize to get you there, essentially by lying with photographs.
This sets wrong expectations, and it's always disappointing to visit because it's never what the photos told you.
You get used to it as a buyer, but setting you up with wrong expectations isn't really what the buyer or seller wants.
Some of these aren't really bad photos, they're just a hard thing to sell. And some others are bad only because they're too honest.
Many are just bad of course. But the fire one is brilliant.
This site is impossible to visit on my setup. Firefox 114, default tracking protection, uBlock origin with default settings.
I am not interested in spending time debugging it, and I can live without seeing those photos.
Better spend that time whining here, where I suppose the ratio of web developers is high: what happened to web development? How come is it so complicated to write a site that displays some photos without falling apart at the first not-totally-mainstream user agent?
Having just gone through a year and a half long search for a house, I'd like to add another good rule:
If the listing lists a room, but there isn't a picture of it, there's usually a good reason.
Real life example: saw a house listed with four bedrooms, listing had pictures of two. The remaining two were unfinished to the point of not having drywall on the ceiling or finished floor materials on the floor.
It's more the captions than the photos. E.g., the one that says "this is where the magic fails to happen", under a drab bedroom with a double bed, is a fairly accurate picture of the current state of that room. It also has a pillow on the bed that says "the best grandma in the world". Not exactly the most exciting thing, making the caption a bit cringy. Unless grandma is a failed witch.
The byline is "Inexplicably bad property photographs". So its clearly the photographs that are supposed to be bad. But almost all of the photographs are objectively not bad. They are exposed and framed correctly. Showing some (mostly bad) real estate.
I took it to mean "these are bad photographs because they fulfil their purpose (selling houses) badly". That covers poor photographs AND poor properties. I’d argue the agents are also poor (in the not-good-at-the-job sense) themselves, as a result. A photograph can be technically perfect and still bad.
I'm not in the market for a new home but still do a weekly check on property for sale in my town, just for the entertainment (and sometimes educational) value of the indoor photos.
I'm still only an amateur voyeur. Pros in my country would attend open home day, where you can go into homes for sale without an appointment. You take your spouse, tour the homes, feast on the free cake and drinks, and never make any offer. A fun and affordable day out for the family, kind of like a real-world Pinterest.
Real-estate photos have improved a lot in recent years. Too much, maybe. Ultra wideangle lenses make rooms seem much bigger and airier than they are.
But I remember the days where the agent would stand at the end of the driveway and snap a polaroid. Invariably these were the "garage forward" kind of house, which from that perspective looked like a big garage door with a house kind of attached in the back, in a by-the-the-way fashion. Awful. Of course that vintage of house (mid 80s) kind of was that way.
These are just funny. Truly terrible real estate agent photos are the ones that distort the image so much to make the room look bigger that it has no real bearing on reality.
This reminds me of the "Worst of Chefkoch" blog [0].
Chefkoch is a German website where users share recipes. Some of them show off their unholy contraptions in gross photos which is then collected by the mentioned blog.
Lots of these types of sites from the past ten years, where the best ones capture the oddity of the photo with a hilarious caption. This one in particular seems really well done.
I expect the next phase of these sites liberally employ the use of AI tools for image generation, i.e. "an apartment with a lawn mower in it".
When I was looking for an apartment to rent in Palo Alto I found a great deal on rent because I visited a place listed on Craigslist that had awful photos.
It turns out the owner was just an older man who wasn’t good with tech, the place was pretty great in person and I ended up living there for a couple of years.
Normal untouched photos are more honest. I also dislike when photos make it ambiguous which unit in a duplex is for sale, or don’t make clear/hide that it’s only part of a lot or something like that.
The one with the all the white / biege colour books, I'd actually love to have all my books on my bookshelves with the same colour. I like all my books, but I think it's quite ugly with how different all the colours are.
Obviously I'd still want to have the name of the book on the spine though. Or to be able to have it colour coded by genre or something, just something more aesthetically pleasing really.
you should see how some real estate offices operate in korea. i guess because housing is seen as such an investment in some hot areas the offices literally just put the price with the square footage, zero photos. maybe a "renovated" note if it has new wallpaper.
completely baffling and infuriating to me as you have no way of knowing what you're looking at. easiest job in the world here.
In italy the real
estate agent can be sidestepped if you know directly the seller, as a consequence the ads they put up are comically balanced to trigger your curiosity but not too much revealing to let you figure out where the place is.
Such a terrible experience as a buyer, i’m baffled this whole charade hasn’t been disrupted by tech already.
In Québec it's starting to be disrupted by duproprio.com where the sellers manages the sale themself. The company takes the pictures & 3d scan and provides legal support.
I guess real estate agents are so good at marketing that we believe it's a hard job that we can't do ourselves.
Yes, that's their job and primary purpose. Yes it's hard. Most people have anxiety to even talk to their neighbors without sweating.
Sure there are lots of idiots out there, like in every profession. But those who are not idiots are providing a valuable service. Try selling your house yourself and then let's chat again about how it's not a hard job that you could just do yourself.
What puzzles me the most is that some people have no trouble doing dangerous DIY like fixing their lawnmower with some duct tape but are scared of selling their house because "legal stuff".
Real estate agent are always hitting the nail with the message that we won't have to worry if we hire them. And because of that message, people have a tendency to think that selling is worrying.
If you are genuinely worried with the selling process, like if you have trouble speaking to your neighbour, sure hire an agent. Same if you don't have the time to do it yourself.
You'll pay them for the real service they provide and their real purpose.
If you are worried because they told you it's worrying, see for yourself.
Every apartment and house I've bought up to this day in my life (and I've moved quite a lot over the decades) would have been almost an impossible sale by the owners themselves. Their realtor was able to present the place, reply with empathy (that is, understood where I was coming from and what my interests are) and get back to me with important info about the property and district that the owners themselves usually had little clue about. The owners themselves where often awkward, hard to talk to and overall pretty clueless.
So, all those folks definitely got something out of hiring a realtor. Nothing to do with "legal stuff". Most people are just terrible at presenting and selling things. And that's fine. Claiming otherwise is closing your eyes for what's out there in the real world.
Just like I said, they can be helpful to a few individuals, but they're not really the embodiment of helpers in the community that they often present themselves like.
I'm looking for an apartment at the moment, and I already amassed quite a collection of such photos.
My favourite is an attic divided by a wall of plasterboard, where on one side you have a full bathroom, on the other a bed. Floor panels everywhere, especially next to the tub. Only one window - on the side of the bathroom.
Surprisingly frequently, photos of NYC listings are taken at strange angles and are so blurry or small so as to be useless. I thought this site was going to talk about these sorts of listings.
I really don't understand 1) how people take such bad/blurry/small photos or 2) why they choose to use them in listings.
This seems more of a "terrible real estates" than "terrible real estate agent photographs".
Sure, sometimes it's the latter and sometimes it's both, but in most cases a photo just shows the property and its flaws. And in this context I'd say that's a good photograph.
This is a fun blog. It reminds me of old sites like Fuck Yeah Mens Wear, that smartly poked fun at consumerism. These days such pages seem to get commercialized and soul-crushed so quickly we hardly get time to appreciate them.
Generally, the use of wide angle lens is a big nuisance in real estate photos. Everything looks 2x bigger than it really is. I understand they want to show more of the house, but take a few normal 35-50mm lens pics please.
Depressingly, am looking at these thinking yeah these are pretty much par for the course in the UK. They must look laughable from a US perspective, but quite standard for a UK buyer without a boat load of equity built up.
They should have used an M.C. Escher drawing rather than Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for that kitchen picture. I stared at it for a good 5 minutes and still can’t tell what is going on.
Real estate agents can only do so much. While some of the photographs are truly terrible, in other cases it's the subject matter that is unsalvageable.
It's one of those websites that have a shelf life of five minutes.
It's hilarious! I can't believe those are real pictures taken by real realtors! It wears off pretty quickly.
And as is typical for these websites, eventually they get under pressure to keep producing new content even when they don't have any actual bad realtor pics on hand, so they start reaching.
What do you expect them to do if the property is still inhabited by the current tenant/owner? The doors both say "Diana," so what?
Friends run https://mappery.org/ which is just photos of "maps in the wild". All user contributed. They have a backlog of several months of photos. Once you have enough followers you get a lot of submissions.
https://plaintextoffenders.com/ stopped after 10 years and 5880 posts which is more than one post per day, all user submissions.
meh. i mean, there are bad photographs, and then there's bad home decor (or at least, non-conventional ones). this site doesn't really differentiate the two. not interested in laughing at people for having unconventional taste, or for being poor, having mental illness, or whatever. call me humorless if you want.
Many of those photos are not really funny, but sad. The author of the site does not care if he kicks downwards. Bad taste memes without the innocence of being a teenager ...
About 10 years ago, me and my wife took LSD on a vacation, and the sheer uselessness of a real estate agent appeared to us.
What does a real estate agent do? They unlock doors.
Who are real estate agents? We can all think of a few real estate agents, none of them are top performers. They are usually on their ~4th career before the age of 30. They are the type of person to wear a suit in public to pretend that it makes them important.
I know an exception to the rule, except he sells multi-family real estate, and owns ~10 single family homes himself. I'd hardly call him a real estate agent at this point, he is a landlord.
I disagree with this. You pay a realtor because a good one stays up to date with what's happening in the market, has a network of vetted contractors/potential buyers/other connections, has up-to-date frameworks for handling the processes and timing of tricky situations that can arise.
Sure, you can do all that yourself if you want, but for the average person, they are providing value.
A Rolodex and a limited understanding of the real estate market. If they really had expert housing market knowledge would they be working as a real estate agent?
IME the ones who are successful long-term and make serious money do indeed use their market knowledge, connections, and access to make real estate plays themselves. Move into owning rentals, do some flipping, that kind of thing. The easiest path seems to be having a spouse who's in a different, but relevant, career (e.g. general contractor).
Having been through buying a home I think I’ll push back on that a little: our agent knew what was a fair price, what we’d likely be able to push the sellers down to, advised us through the whole process.
Rental brokers on the other hand… now they’re absolutely useless and you can sometimes pay astronomical brokers fees just so they can sit between you and the landlord.
Same. Our realtor wasn’t in any hurry to sell us a house (showed us 40 houses over about 7 different days actually) and wasn’t afraid to point out the negatives of the house and what we should be looking for in a good first home and take into consideration if we ever wanted to resell it. I learned quite a bit from him during the process.
He also didn’t mind seeing a bunch of houses because even if we weren’t interested in a house it built up his knowledge about the market and could possibly recommend the house to others.
We did have another realtor that wasn’t like that though when we were considering moving to another state, who mainly was just there to show houses and never pointed anything out, in fact she barely talked.
Didn’t really see the value with her, although shortly after the mortgage rates jacked up fast and made moving less appealing (we looked just before the Fed jacked up interest rates), so we didn’t go any further in the process anyway.
Even an incompetent agent serves a very valuable purpose in a real estate purchase.
Without the agents, you'd have two people attempting to negotiate a 6 (or 7, nowadays!) figure purchase directly. Before it was over, you'd hate the other party too much to ever complete a sale.
Agents sit between the two parties and have a vested interest in seeing a transaction take place. They talk to each other and soften the communication so that you can tell someone you want to pay them fifty-fucking-grand less money for the single largest asset in their life that they were counting on to fund their retirement, and have that met with a counter-offer instead of an angry storming off.
I had a similar experienced, though I'm biased by being related to an agent, but having worked with good ones and bad ones, there can be a difference. Bad agents are glorified door unlockers and sign placers, but good ones have experience marketing, know the market well enough to make recommendations, help with staging and making a property attractive, and advocating for their client during sales. If the game was different, maybe they'd be redundant, but a good agent is a real ally and can move a house quickly.
> our agent knew what was a fair price, what we’d likely be able to push the sellers down to, advised us through the whole process.
I've seen cases where the sales agent knew the seller's minimum and basically told that to the buyer. They didn't negotiate on the seller's behalf so much as negotiate to get the deal done quicker.
I'm sure the buyer's agent looked good to the buyer. This scenario and the one you describe are almost indistinguishable, depending on which party you are.
You aren’t wrong, but it means you have to do your own research and generally only have access to public information. A realtor who knows their market has done that research for you (saving you time) and generally has information beyond what you can get off Zillow et al.
I don't need a mechanic to repair my car, either. I could spend hours doing the research, risk maybe being wrong and fix the thing myself. Or I could hire a professional.
A good real estate agent can provide a lot of value, especially if you're a first-time buyer.
* They've seen a lot of houses, and know what to look out for even before you commit to calling in inspectors.
* They've seen a lot of closings, and can handle all of the title/law crud. "Quick closing" can be a big plus to some sellers.
* They've seen a lot of negotiations, and can help you get a feel for how the other party is thinking.
There certainly are people who unlock the door, stare at their phone all day, and collect their commission. Those aren't very good agents, even if they can get the job done when the market is extremely short on supply.
Strongly disagreed. Unless you regularly buy and sell houses, when it comes to buying a house, you are out of your depth. You need the help of a professional, and you want one who is looking out for your interests.
I admit finding a real estate agent who you can trust is not easy. I don't know how to do it, other than from who you know. I was lucky, and ours was a friend of my wife's family.
There are plenty of next-to-useless agents, just like there are plenty of next-to-useless software developers.
Our agent (used twice, 15 years apart) was great. Both times, in strong sellers markets, so lots of offers made and rejected. Lots of last second "OMG, just listed, can we see it NOWNOWNOW!"
Very expensive, but so is a house.
Now that I've been through the process a few times, could I do it without? Probably. At the right price, would I use an agent regardless? Absolutely. The old 6% rate seems quite high for a basic sale given online MLS listings, though for a very specific home in a small market, might still be worth that (I'm think lake homes in my neighborhood - rare listings, selling for $50k+ premium over non-lake on same street, often have a buyer lined up before listing, so really hard to actually buy one without an agent who knows people).
Ha! I feel like I’m in the crazy house as you’re the only other person who has asked that…all these well thought out responses that seem completely oblivious to the doozy of an introduction.
“So I once played poker with a gorilla and [insert point]” and everybody only talks about the point and not the gorilla???
Realtors thrive on nepotism though and double ending jobs with their friends or even themselves. There's plenty of homes that are bought and sold without hitting any public listing site. Agents just might call up another agent the know and go "Hey I got a buyer for a 3br in these neighborhoods, you guys got anything coming up?" and vice versa. Without an agent you are locked out of that side of the market and probably at a serious disadvantage, overpaying for property that didn't manage to sell through this "premarket" for whatever reason which could in fact be for red flag issues.
I have to say I found estate agents quite useful (mostly when I was renting). I much preferred dealing with a letting dept. of a reputable estate agency than random landlords. Yes, I had good landlords(funnily enough when I was quite poor in the cheapest accommodation possible), but I had bad ones too. I never had a bad renting experience with an agency. Stuff always got repaired on time, cleaners got hired to clean common areas, electricity and gas got inspected regularly. All those things are not a certainty with random landlords and you only find out once you've moved.
When I bought my first house, my agent was invaluable. He certainly helped me avoid a bunch of bad decisions.
He never actually said "don't buy this house" at any property we looked at, but he would point out things I wouldn't have thought about like, "it's nice, but I wonder if there's a lot of noise from that street later in the day when people are home from work" or "I guess you wouldn't want to play with marbles in here" (house with a sloping floor likely due to foundation shifting) and a lot of other remarks to point out things that I, as an apartment dweller, wouldn't have considered.
I may have gotten that first house entirely due to him: I wanted to lowball the offer, but he pointed out that that neighborhood was a hot area and the house was very reasonably priced. I later found out that there was actually a slightly higher offer than mine, but since I had offered the asking price and came in first, the owners thought it was only ethical that they sell to me.
I've certainly met useless RE agents since, but there are definitely some that earn their percentage! The guy who sold my last house was also a builder and he fixed a problem that would have held up the sale on his own dime!
Not exactly real estate agents for buying/selling but related:
I remember reading about the fact that, at the time, most apartments in NYC were "broker only" (aka you can only see and then rent an apartment if you are using a licensed real estate broker).
The more I thought about this, I started to see the benefits for both sides:
- for the landlord: the broker acts as a filter for people who are serious vs "looky loos" (actual quote from a real broker)
- for the tenant: the broker wants repeat business so they will, in theory, only deal with reputable landlords
- for the tenant part 2: if you are a busy, hard working individual, the broker acts as your "agent" (in the principal agent sense of the word) to save you time by going and finding apartments for you so that you can focus on your high paying job.
The problem with brokers is that they can charge 1-2 months rent. That means you can easily be left with a 8k bill for moving into a new apartment.
The job literally could not exist anywhere else because no one would pay it. But they aren't making any more land in Manhattan and they aren't building subway lines quick enough so landlords get to pass that expense off to tenants
If you are a top earning investment banker or lawyer, it's still worth it to pay that rather than spending 10+ hours of your time going to apartments etc. Most of "seeing apartments" is "let me get to the apartment by cab (stuck in traffic) or by subway (oh, delays, oh well)" so it's even less efficient for you to do that vs a broker.
In the South East of England I found that estate agents were very proactive, stereotypical Audi TT-driving widemen who wore suits and had good haircuts and would work hard to make a sale. When it came time to sell then I found them to be lazy and almost useless, taking bad pictures, writing incorrect descriptions and showing no urgency. I guess they figure that the house will sell one way or another and the difference between a good or bad listing might only be a few % of the sale price, which means their cut will only change by £100 or so.
Alternately in the North East then I had a much different experience (albeit only on the buying side) - estate agents were almost exclusively women who answered phones, and viewings were done by the sellers themselves.
Honestly, I had this exact same attitude before my last home purchase. We began by assuming that Redfin was good enough. By the time the deal closed, we really appreciated what an experienced agent with at least a vague awareness of real-estate law could do. When the FSBO seller tried to back out at the last minute, our (obviously motivated) buyer's agent was able to set him straight. Without his help, I'm certain the situation would have turned into a nightmare scenario involving actual lawyers.
That doesn't mean I won't try the easy/cheap way first next time, but it does mean I no longer dismiss all realtors as useless parasites who need to be "disrupted" at all costs.
>What does a real estate agent do? They unlock doors.
Think of real estate agents through the perspective of the 10x programmers we love to talk about here. The multitude of agents are as you describe - they publish listing photos from their phone, they know how to open a door, and then can mostly write down what you tell them on standardized forms. A 10x agent on the other hand, will absolutely benefit you in the same way that a 10x programmer will outproduce. Classic 80/20 rule stuff, where you want to be working with the 20 and ignore the 80.
> What does a real estate agent do? They unlock doors.
> Who are real estate agents? We can all think of a few real estate agents, none of them are top performers. They are usually on their ~4th career before the age of 30. They are the type of person to wear a suit in public to pretend that it makes them important.
Let's not pretend the software engineering world isn't full of hubris. Even the title itself is illegal in parts of the world because our career isn't a real engineering field.
> What does a real estate agent do? They unlock doors.
I think it depends on the local market, but this was certainly my feeling when trying to rent a place in London. I visited 15 properties in a couple of days. Most agents just unlocked the door, sometimes seeing the place for the first time, most often clueless about the place. Actually a couple of them weren't even able to open the door and didn't have the right key.
I wouldn't go quite that far. They also handle the paperwork and coordination with the other agent, which is not a trivial job. It's highly questionable if the value they add is worth 5% of the gross sale price of the house, especially in our amazingly inflated markets, but few if any agents seem interested in working at hourly rates.
>few if any agents seem interested in working at hourly rates
It’s because most agents work as self-employed contractors under the auspices of a brokerage, and the brokerage is not going to allow that. And/ or, in a state using standardized legal documents, we don’t even have a form for that, which means we’d need to come up with an hourly contract from scratch - and the brokerages will put their foot down on that too.
This is the practice in many countries and even several US states. The listing services we have in the US are not universal either, which I think performs a really important role in providing information to the public and creating a more level informational playing field.
I think you are being a little unfair to them, but at the same time...
They get 5% of most single family residential transactions. And recently it was 6% that was standard. And the industry works really hard to protect those profits.
It is a lot of money that comes right out of consumers pockets.
I had a client who only sold 5million$+ estates and I went with them a few times on showings and I bought quite a few houses myself in the 5-20k range. The effort made by the estate agent was the same; close to nothing. I don’t know what’s wrong with these people and they definitely don’t deserve the commission. But when I ask just give me the location and the keys, they don’t do that. So totally useless and yet they want to come with you.
Here you have to sign a contract (so competitors or the owner don't sell it cheaper to you) and they take a copy of your passport and proof of residency. So not exactly strangers. And in this cases where I asked for the keys, they were local realestate agents I went to school with. Not that anybody locks their door over here; it's just often not clear what the location is to prevent personal negotiations.
> it's just often not clear what the location is to prevent personal negotiations.
Oh no, we had a bug once when our software uploaded the property to the web with the address unlocked. The place got swarmed by people who would just enter the property at any time, not giving a damn about the owner's privacy. They were ringing the doorbell, asking about the price and if they could see the place right then and there. Agents are the first line of defense against shitty people.
There was a now deleted reply to that, probably intended as a joke, about how the cost of electricity for all those cameras would wipe out the profit.
I was curious and did the math. I'm using motion sensitive security cameras that only record and upload when motion is detected. At the places with the most expensive residential electricity in the US or the EU 1000 of those cameras would need under $5 of electricity per year. There's also the thing that the cameras upload to. I don't know how much power that uses, but it is powered by a 5 W USB power supply so can't be more than $22/year.
If your wife and you took LSD and it "appeared" to you that all doctors do is run around in stupid white coats, would that reveal more about the field of medicine or the two of you?
"It requires professional help to facilitate emotionally charged, million+ dollar transactions" would be the more useful insight.
Very few people chose to forego aan agent when dealing in RE, there's a reason for that. I am a finance dude quite capable of negotiating etc and I still found out agent super valuable and would use her again.
It's possible you know crappy agents who deal in low-end transactions but again that may reveal more about you than the field.
This will sound harsh, but mostly real estate agents are suckers who are actively getting scammed by the brokerage. Brokerages have a virtual monopoly (oligopoly) on listings and comparable sale prices though MLS (I'm in Canada but I think the US is the same) and as such it's in most seller's and buyers interests use them. Agents are getting charged all sorts of scam fees to market themselves in exchange for getting to tap into the MLS. Every ad and stupid video and contract and mailer and whatnot is getting sold to them by the brokerage who is siphoning off all the money they can. The real suckers are the agents, even if they don't really do anything.
There might be some nuance here between the US and Canada - would love to chat over frosty beverages and learn more and the system up there as eventually I’d like to expand into BC. The MLS fees (I belong to two and will likely join a third and possibly fourth) aren’t terrible and I would say listing services are generally a good thing for both the consumer public and agents. But - as you note - the public has a very limited view of all the ways brokerages and various third-parties try to scam and fleece agents. The overall system is exploitative of agents and that has a role in the cost to consumers for real estate services. And, name brand online services are just another third party looking to make money off agents.
The reply was a bit harsh, but let's not act like the real estate industry isn't riddled with skeezy practices.
1) Home inspections that aren't really "inspections" and are just there to grease the skids
2) Buyer's agents don't have a fiduciary duty to protect the buyers.
3) Pricing "knowledge" that is typically public info, just locked behind access restrictions
4) predatory lending practices
It's a very incestuous market where the agents are friends with mortgage loan officers at banks, handymen, inspectors, and law offices that handle closing.
The fact that it costs somewhere between 10-15% of the value of a home to actually transfer ownership is highway robbery.
>Home inspections that aren't really "inspections" and are just there to grease the skids
I hear this a lot on here and I wonder what state people are in or if the laws are somehow different elsewhere. In the states where I do business, there are state mandated checklists of systems and inspectors could be held liable if they don’t show reasonable care and professionalism in gathering the data for their report. The inspectors I use pride themselves on the adoption of technology (drones for checking out roofs, thermal imaging for heat loss and insulation, etc) and often take the better part of a day on even small houses. So, I dunno man - I hear this stuff about inspectors a lot, but it doesn’t jive with what I expect the ones I refer to people to actually do.
There were many, and varied things missed in my inspection. The biggest was the entire HVAC system being messed up. The furnace was incorrectly installed, improperly sized for the house, and didn't even have any return ductwork installed.
The air flow seemed really bad in the bedroom and so one day I decided to climb up into the attic and take a look. The problem with the return air missing was immediately obvious. When I called the inspector to ask why they'd miss something so obvious I was given an excuse and pointed toward the part of the contract that states they're not liable. I eventually got them to refund the cost of the inspection, but it was hundreds of dollars back for over ten thousand dollars in missed issues. I was only able to get anything because I worked for a real estate company at the time and knew the right people who could apply pressure.
I had a friend of mine get his house inspected when buying, they never found (so apparently didn't plug a tester into it) multiple loose plugs, didn't note the plumbing line wrapped in an inch thick of electrical tape for a leak, and said the roof was inspected for leaks and "certified" for atleast a year but told 5 years it would need a replacement. When their kitchen ceiling started bubbling a year in I went up into the attic space and it was clear the roof had been leaking since before they bought it by the stains and mold it left on the wood. It was a complete joke of an inspection, and what makes it worse is none of that was hard to access. The attic space was accessible from the garage area with no ceiling and was easily walkable with 10 ft+ height, the loose plugs were in the living room and in plain view right when you walk in, and the taped up pipe was 15 feet into a concrete basement with a mere glance upward. Not to mention the other laundry list of items that weren't broken really but should have been noted by an inspector doing their job.
They tried to get the inspector for the obvious bullshit roof inspection but after getting ran around multiple times to the point of needing to hire lawyer to go any further. But eventually dropped it when some roofing company came by and offered to do the roof for "free" through their insurance because of supposed hail damage in the area that basically replaced half the roofs in the town. That too was probably a scam on the insurance by the roofers because we never had big enough hail for damage, but they weren't going to complain about a free new shingle job.
TL;DR Don't just grab any random inspector, and especially never take recommendations from anybody connected to real estate.
Here’s something I say to my clients: personally, if I am buying a property, I am unlikely to do an inspection because I’ve seen a lot of houses and systems and am generally able to assess for myself the quality of the systems and construction. But - especially for first time buyers - people who buy and sell houses infrequently and who don’t have a background in these things are at an informational deficit. For that reason, while the list of things an inspector checks can never be complete, it’s more information than a buyer may be able to gather on their own. Houses are just like software systems - they will never be bug free, bugs pop up for various reasons, and all an inspector is really doing is telling you the state of the system on a given day.
Also - I’m about to stop recommending one of my recommended inspectors, because he’s at best a “B”. He catches most issues, but the level of care isn’t what I want for my clients. There’s another guy I used to recommend but again, he’s nearing retirement and getting sloppy.
I agree, it feels really odd that making a huge ticket item purchase, if something goes wrong the max liability it the inspection price. A drop in the bucket for some issues they should have brought to light.
That’s actually very close to the excuse they gave! It’s my opinion that if an inspector can’t identify the absence of a critical and primary component of a home, they don’t really provide much value.
Real life example from Chatham County, NC. Family built a new house. Passed all inspections. House is not structurally sound and they've been advised the house needs to be completely rebuilt. They won a suit against the home builder, but the builder hasn't paid.
The county inspector was fired, but the county is not taking financial responsibility.
Building inspections are not really the same as purchase inspections, or at least don’t seem to me like they should be. Purchase inspection generally might not see a partially-constructed building or blueprints or otherwise be able to verify the engineering plan is being followed—They’re looking for broken/nonfunctional appliances/mechanicals/systems, clear fire hazards, mold, infestations, and the like.
The outcome of a building inspection is a certificate of occupancy where the authority is stating the home is safe to live in, the outcome of a purchase inspection is a report of things to ask for a discount on, part of the purchase negotiation.
The Chatham County thing is crazy, I’m hoping the family manages to find someone accountable in that mess — clearly either the original architect, the builder, or the county let them down somehow. I’m just not sure it’s really an indictment of the “inspector” profession as discussed in this thread.
The seller is paying the buyer's agent so I'm not sure why they'd have a fiduciary duty to the buyer. Agents aren't about representation at all. That's what your lawyer and lender are for (the lender acts in your best interest in their own self interest). The purpose of the agents are to make the transaction happen. The seller's agent handles this on the seller side, e.g. showing the house, making it available for inspections, etc. The buyer's agent makes this happen on the buyer's side, e.g. makes sure the buyer schedules the inspections, has their lender lined up, etc. The agents are there to make the deal happen. That's their only purpose.
Neither agent has a fiduciary duty even to the person that hired them, in the US. That situation took a lot of lobbying to create, and takes a lot of lobbying to preserve. The agents can make a deal between them that they both profit from and screws both the buyer and the seller.
Totally agree on the inspection. They're next to useless - a friend bought a home a few years ago, super-weird water heater/HVAC system (co-mingled, WTF), never mentioned by the inspector. When it broke a year later, it was a VERY expensive fix, and I think they might have recovered a few hundred $$ from the inspector (on a many thousands repair).
An agent is only getting 5-6% of the home value (assuming no split with a second agent). And a big chunk of that goes to the brokerage.
We searched and vetted and found our own inspector. On Yelp of all places, one of the least trustworthy websites. It took us less than a day to find someone good.
And he found absolutely every single imaginable problem even down to the most hysterically unimportant detail. Like the tension on one of the kitchen/garage door hinges being slightly higher than the bottom door hinge. This was on a list of over 100 other things.
The point is, inspectors are jobs like anyone else. Some are good, some bad.
The problem isn't whether they find a problem. Even the best inspector will miss things occasionally. The problem is they have zero legal liability for that miss. The buyer is making the biggest purchase of their life on a report that cost ~$1000 and has no legal backing (beyond maybe recovering the ~$1000 inspection fee).
And then you have home insurance which isn't a whole lot better. They might fix the problem or they might manage to declare is pre-existing and deny coverage, but even if they do fix it, it'll be the lowest bidder installing the cheapest parts possible.
When dealing with Home/Property insurance, always talk to a reputable public adjuster or general contractor. I worked at a general contractor construction company in a state where contractors can also act as public adjusters. We routinely caught insurance adjusters overlooking damage, lying, or straight up committing fraud.
The laws for insurance are very complex, and all of the material standards are locked behind paywalls. For an average person (me before I worked there) insurance is basically a black box; you can't argue against any of their points because they hide the criteria.
>but even if they do fix it, it'll be the lowest bidder installing the cheapest parts possible.
This is true, but illegal. You are owed for "Like Kind And Quality" according to the law. This means that the insurance company can't downgrade your materials, and they have to repair the property to AT LEAST pre-storm conditions. Additionally, it is your legal right to choose a construction crew or contractor of your choice, and the insurance company can't veto your decision. After the work is complete, make sure that you, the construction company, and the insurance company have copies of the specifications of your materials and what work was done. This way it will be much harder for insurance to fuck you over on your next claim.
Most contractors in my area are genuinely trying to help the clients. There are some contractors who take advantage of the innocent and gullible population, though. I hate them just as much as insurance companies.
Sorry, I was thinking of home warranties. You're exactly right on home insurance.
Two very different products, the former being a borderline scam much of the time, the latter being a requirement for financing (and common sense).
Current example for me... house is 50+ year old, with copper pipe for water supply. We're starting to get pin-hole leaks on some pipes. AFAIK, insurance considers this a maintenance item. They'd probably fix a major burst and the damage it causes (after the fact) but have no interest in even subsidizing preventative work to avoid the costly repair.
They consider it a maintenance item, because it is a maintenance item. Things in your house wearing out are not a homeowners insurance claim (at least not in the US).
"And he found absolutely every single imaginable problem even down to the most hysterically unimportant detail."
The fact an inspection document is impressive to read doesn't mean it is accurate. If he blew you away with his ability to name 100 minor things, but missed a structural issue, you'd be screwed, and would have no way to know this until the structure starting cracking.
Thank you for this - the public should redirect a lot of their anger away from the agents and toward their brokerages. Likewise - please don’t use Zillow, Redfin, etc to contact an agent. Call the agent directly, as these online sites take a big pile of money out of the agents pocket as well.
I want to believe changes are coming in real estate, as the long standing brokerage model exploits agents and confuses the public.
Sample of 1, but my agent was frequently closing several homes/week during peak season (Spring, early Summer). At the time (2017), typical listing would be $500-$1 million (Fairfax County, VA).
So I'd guess 20-30/year for her.
Broker keeps 30-50% of the commission.
So, a good agent in NoVA is probably making $250-$500k/year (but has to pay their own payroll taxes and stuff out of that, IIRC).
The estate agent percentage in the U.K. is typically around 2% of property value in total, paid by the seller, with virtually nobody using a buyers agent. I have never understood why fees are so crazy in the USA.
Real estate lobbying associations such as the NAR writing state laws, massively donating to campaigns, and paying huge speaking fees to ex-politicians. I once worked pretty deeply in the industry.
High-value emotional purchases attract it more for obvious reasons. You see it less in cheap commodities. Your transactions at the grocery store tend to be pretty honest.
Weird, having bought/sold a number of houses in the last ten years (our family moved several times), I can't say I've ever run into a real estate agent that seemed like a "high pressure" salesman. Perhaps its just the market so they don't really need to try, but IME the best real estate agents -- on the buyers side, at least -- were the ones that listened carefully and did a good job of finding houses that matched our needs. Definitely requires soft skills/empathy, but not really a sales role.
Do such things exist? Are there real estate agents who are like "and if you buy today, we'll throw in this grill!"? Genuinely curious.
On the general utility of real estate agents...
Really knowing a market and understanding construction/houses/permitting, etc... is a pretty important knowledge/skill set. I had one excellent agent figuratively drag me away from a condo that she understood to have serious foundation/construction defects. The good ones will help you understand what's good/bad about a house, problems to be alert for, etc...
Like a lot of middle men, I think they do provide some service of value. Now, is that worth 3%/6% of a houses value? In many cases, undoubtedly not. We sold a house in Austin when the market was so hot that we got an eye popping offer the day after the agent put a "pending" sign in the yard. I think he did like 4 hrs total work. So afaict, the profession as a whole acts as sort of a rentier over the MLS listings.
A year ago when our market was much hotter, I listed a property that I knew would sell quickly. Where I added value though was in knowing exactly when to list it, the price to list it, how to build pre-market interest, how to bring it to market in a way that would force buyers to compete only on price, and ultimately, I got the price up another $200k (and other concessions) for my sellers because of how I negotiated once offers were on the table. So even in a hot market, your agent’s skill does matter in yielding an optimal rather than just a “good” outcome.
Yes, they have much more skills than just wearing a suit and opening doors.
It's also a job which accomodates way more scum type people than you'd see in typical office jobs. As you note the incentives are very different, the pressure as well, and the recipes for success can involve screwing people over a lot of money.
The profession doesn't seem to have much interest in dealing with moral hazards.
Yes, and even if you are a “top performer” doing gods work… that does not give you any right to belittle others. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment and would pay money to see us as a collective (me included) try our hand at something like real estate. I for one know I would fail, but that’s me.
Hard disagree. For people taking 6% of purchase price in fees, real estate agents need to be vastly better than they are. They were insufferable in Austin over the past few years, the silver lining of a serious housing crash would be watching them try to join the ranks of the productive.
It reminds me of IT recruiters in the UK a few years back: [1] sums up the situation very well and applies just as much.
The right thing to do is I think to digitise the process. Having a transparent way of following a bidding session and subsequent legal arrangement to completion would be extremely useful, and would surely scale pretty well.
Ok I’ll rephrase: We software engineers tried to buy/sell houses using algorithms, and failed to the tune of $550m. I think we collectively would have similar success (or lack thereof) as actual real estate agents.
In my experience, there are people with a talent for talking, and have a natural attraction. People just want to talk to them. But that's not most people in sales (even if they are often top).
The key skills to be successful in sales are similar. Dedication, problems solving, and an interest in what you're doing. Many here could pick it up.
> I think you highly under-estimate the sales skills and other life competencies required to be in a high pressure sales job like being a real estate agent.
Agreed - I laugh when people call me a “salesman”. Matchmaker and project manager are more in line, with a whole lot of very specialized knowledge of finance, marketing, negotiation, soils, fencing, construction, environmental law…
Right. "opening doors" can euphemistically describe any capable salesperson. Gotta open doors to sell that $100m fighter jet. For that matter, it can describe a dealmaker in any tech company.
Bought current house without agent (very desirable part of Los Angeles). Selling now without agent. If you buy with an agent you put yourself at a disadvantage because the selling agent will need to split the commission (typically 2.5% a piece or so). When you make an offer on a home without a buying agent, suddenly your offer looks a lot more attractive to the selling agent, who is the only point of contact the seller has into what is happening with their property in terms of offers. People wonder how we got our house so cheap—bank on the real estate agents being greedy. They are the worst, period. I have not met a single one who will not double end a deal in 10 years in the LA market. Not sure how the current sale will go, but I will not work with an agent, I’ve dealt with too many to make that mistake.
I’ve seen this happen many times in LA. Never in SF, and once in Oakland. I don’t have much experience outside California but helped friends in Chicago buy a condo. It definitely helped that they didn’t have an agent and leveraged the listing agent.
Not having an agent is generally a big asset when buying a home, much more than anything an agent will bring to you.
>definitely helped that they didn’t have an agent and leveraged the listing agent.
Ooof. Gotta be careful with this one and understand agency law in your respective state. That listing agent may not actually be working for you the buyer, even if they help you fill out the paperwork.
They're not working for the seller either, they're working for themselves. They are not a fiduciary to any party. You can get screwed by an agent regardless of who hired them.
>If you buy with an agent you put yourself at a disadvantage because the selling agent will need to split the commission
I can’t speak to California law, but this isn’t explicitly true in either market where I work. Non-agency is a thing in some places, and depending on the terms of the listing contract the listing agent might pocket both sides regardless if there isn’t a buyer’s agent.
I’d also argue that there are a lot of properties where a buyer benefits from expertise on the part of an agent - either negotiating strategies or local market concerns. In my market for example understanding environmental and construction issues and value add that a buyer won’t know without doing meaningful research on their own.
I have done both (I have also purchased with a realtor), all in rural Oregon.
I did a FSBO in a tiny town and the property was purchased directly by a buyer that was also without a realtor, but both sides had a mortgage from a national bank, and inspections happened, there was a boilerplate contract (the same one the previous realtor used for us buying the house, the lawyer’s name was on the contract) and a title company. The transaction was on rails. Could not have been smoother or cheaper.
For that place we knew the local market was small and the rumor mill active and figured we could FSBO for a bit before we contacted a real estate agent if we needed access to the MLS and non local buyers.
As for the time we purchased without an agent, we purchased a few 100 acre ranch from our family and did so with a real estate contract, seller financing and no mortgage. It would have been difficult to get financing at a reasonable rate for a property of this kind. This involved a fair bit of time dealing with lawyers and neither party is happy with the lawyers but the deal got done.
"KP: Is it important for you that the photos actually originate from real estate marketplaces? If so, how do you verify their origin?
AD: Yes, that’s actually really important, otherwise the blog is just unverifiable user-generated content. If an image is submitted without a link, or no agent’s logo on the image, or I can’t find the source online, I tend not to use it. I’m sent lots of images taken by agents of something funny or shocking they’ve seen in a property that day, but if the image hasn’t been taken for the purposes of marketing the house, I don’t use it."