Are you thinking of hiring an agent to help you buy or sell a home but are wondering how much it’s going to cost? In this video, we’re going to go over the costs of hiring an agent to help you purchase a home or sell your existing one. We’ll look at some common fees and what they’re used for so you can make the best decision about hiring a realtor.
Assessing Your Goals
Before hiring any company for a product or service, one of the things you want to look at is the cost. In real estate, this will change depending on whether you’re buying or selling. While you might be doing both, we’ll take them one at a time to see how much it will cost you.
Let's imagine you're buying a home. First of all, you need to talk to us to figure out what your goals, needs, and wants are. What are you looking to do? We call that a buyer consultation. We’ll sit down and show you everything we do for buyers—which is way beyond what most agents do.
What We Do For Buyers
Most agents just get you access to active properties on the MLS, or Multiple Listing Service. We, however, get you access to 13-15 different sources of homes that nobody else knows about using our proprietary system.
When you decide to work with us, we’ll get active and get to work for you. What's cool is that most of the properties on the MLS are all represented by other agents. They're already offering out what they call a buyer agent fee, buyer broker fee, or compensation. All or most of our fees are already included in that. And if we bring you to an off-market home—such as for sale by owner or a previously expired property—we can negotiate our fee with the seller.
Fees typically range anywhere from 1- 4% when you're hiring a really good agent. As a buyer, you never need to pay us out-of-pocket for our services. While we do have some premium services that you may want to upgrade to, these can be included in the transaction. We often get the seller to pay for that so it doesn't come out of your pocket. While every situation is different, just know you have very little out-of-pocket expense when you're hiring a buyer's agent.
Negotiating For You
When you’re looking to buy a house, we'll go over all the details when we talk to you and show you all your options. Once we find you a great home, we're going to make sure we get it for you. We’ll negotiate based upon your wants, needs, and desires—which means getting you the home at the best price possible, listening to you, and taking your instruction on what goals you have for acquiring that property.
Once we help you acquire the property, we go through the whole due diligence period to make sure you're not buying a lemon. We help you throughout the financing and all the title work, with professionals to help you at every step. We hold your hand throughout the whole process.
Each agent partner—plus our team, staff, and transaction coordinators—help you get through all the details. Eventually, we get you to closing and we hand you the keys. The good news is that you never pay for any of our services unless we actually find you a home. Plus, we get paid out of the deal.
What We Do For Sellers
Now let's imagine that you're selling a house. In this case, costs vary. There's no set price for any agent, which is called price fixing; you can't do that in our industry. Our team has a menu of available services. Our fees can go as low as 3% up to 7% in tiers of gold, silver, and bronze plans. We’ll have a little bit of nuance in each of those plans, depending on where the buyer comes from.
When you pick one of our plans and you're ready to go to the market, we need to help you prepare your home for sale. One of the big value adds we bring to the table is getting your home ready for sale so it looks its best. Imagine going on a date and wanting to look the very, very best you can. That's what we're doing; we're about to date the marketplace. We want to get your house looking the best.
What does this include? We're going to clean up, paint some rooms, and possibly remove some furniture to open up the space. My favorite line in terms of preparing your home for sale is, “we want to sell the space, not your stuff.” We normally have one of our professional stagers—at our expense—go in and give you advice on what to do and what not to do to get the most money when we put your home on the market.
Once that's done, we go to the multimedia phase. We bring in our professional photographer and professional videographer, depending on what plan that you picked, and do all the work upfront. You don't pay any of this out of pocket; you only pay when we actually sell your home.
Getting You The Best Deal
Once we get your home prepared for sale—meaning it’s looking amazing, we have the photos, the 3D virtual tour and video are done, and we’ve uploaded floor plans—we’ll next go to market. We can either go privately to market (non-MLS) or we can go directly to the MLS. There are pros and cons to each, and we can talk to you about that when we get there.
Once we go live, we'll produce marketing on Facebook and Google and spend money on advertising. Again, all of this is not out of your pocket at all. Next, we go online, and then we host open houses or private showings. Our whole staff is dedicated to making sure we do a great job for your home, getting it the maximum exposure.
Once we get showings and offers, it’s time to negotiate the deal. Once the deal is negotiated, our staff makes sure every I gets dotted and every T gets crossed to make sure you get your big check—which will usually be wired directly into your account. Finally, we’ll get paid at closing depending on whatever plan you picked, anywhere from 3- 7%.
I hope this gave you a good idea of how much it costs to hire an agent, whether you’re buying or selling. If you have any more questions or would like more information on working with us, make sure to reach out and we’d be happy to connect!