R I C H

Each property I've sold here has ultimately been concluded with one realtor or the other giving up some commission to make the deal happen. I'm an intransigent sorta guy, but on a couple of occasions it's been close to $10k, and I'd rather have that in my pocket than the realtors.


In small markets, such as Sun Peaks, there may only be one realtor to deal with, so inevitably the buyer and seller are dealing with the same party. It's not a healthy situation in my experience, but getting a realtor to drag themselves an hour out of town from Kamloops can be problematic.

dbd33

I too have been involved in transactions which eventually closed on a commission cut. I've also been involved in one where the selling agent, who was also a car dealer, proposed a discount on a car rather than a commission cut and another where the agent who had a line in appliances, offered some of those to close the deal. I've heard of a broker using stays in a holiday resort as a closing incentive.

It's just buying and selling, any sort of deal might be struck.

Souvy

Here is a summary of my experiences.

We used a buying agent when we bought our house in Oakville. She got us a good deal.

We used her to sell it 18 months later. She told us exactly what to do and what not to do before we put it on the market (changing the paint colour in the kitchen, for example). We accepted an offer the day it went on the market. That buyer had to pull out but another one came along. The place was sold within days, and set a record for the street. There was a realtor fee but we didn't care. It was a military posting, so the government picked up the tab.

At this end, we got a buying agent. My wife had been here for a couple of days before I came up on a Friday. We visited this house early in the afternoon.

Offer. Counter-offer. Split-the-difference offer. Acceptance. Inspection. Meeting with notary. We were on our way back to Oakville before lunch on the Sunday. We couldn't have done that by ourselves.

A couple of years ago we helped our son buy a house near Quebec City. It was a sale by owner and he got everything wrong. The place was in very bad repair and filthy. No wonder he wasn't getting any interest. We just looked at the bones. Telling us he was about to go bankrupt was a howling mistake. He had little option but to accept our absurdly low offer. He'd have done a lot better with an agent.

Pine Cone

Next question then, is mcuh would you typically pay in commission in total? Do they agree a set fee or a percentage?

This is probably one of the things I found varies so much compared to the UK and the time we spent in NZ/Australia. This is also perhaps why we ended up doing the private sale route.

In the UK agents in our old town charged between about 1.75% and 2.85% plus VAT. However when we sold our first house it was less than 5 year old almost new-build so wouldn't be hard to sell. As such we negotiated and paid 1% plus VAT. We had a few people round and got the full asking price within 24 hours of listing. Second house we had about 8-10 agents round for their 'free market appraisal' and their valuations varied by GBP30k. We stuck it on the higher end, knew it would sell quickly again as new-ish house and again got offer for full asking price by the end of the first day.

When we sold in last place in NZ, agents commission started at about 5% plus GST plus all advertising costs on top of that. It worked out $1000's more than we paid in the UK, which was horrifying, so we paid about $160 for 12 months online advertising, answered a few emails and phone calls, showed a few people round and sold within about 12 weeks.

not2old

Our daughter sold her built in 1981 3-bedroom detached sub-division property in Whitby Ontario on February 11, 2016.

It sold within 3 days of the listing at 20% over asking price with three multiple offers

She interviewed three agents from different brokerages & went with the most expensive commission agent REMAX at 5%. There is no forward purchase through this listing agent.

The agent paid for staging the house, for the class A photo's & house tour slide show, the pre-house sale inspection by a qualified house inspector.

The way it was listed was 10% below the average selling price in the area in the last 3 months. The listing stated that offers to be presented & received one-week from the listing date.

In the three days it had 15 showings

The buyer used their own agent, no conditions, waved the house inspection because it had already been done & paid for by the listing agent.

Souvy

I think it varies from province to province. Realtors here seem to do a lot more of the work than their counterparts in the UK do, including much of the stuff you would expect a lawyer to do.

dbd33

Eeek! I had a house inspection done, as did my daughter in selling her house, and provided copies for prospective buyers in the hope that they'd waive. The reason, of course, was that by paying for the inspection we could have editorial control and have the inspector ignore the bad points of the house.

Novocastrian

I do. When, in 1993, we bought our house in Richmond Hill, we didn't use a selling agent. We and the vendor were $12,000 apart and neither of us were prepared to budge. What happened was that the listing agent suggested a compromise in which all three parties moved by $4000, with the agent reducing her commission by that amount.

We sold the same house in 2015 for exactly 3.5x our buying price, so multiply the amounts by that much to translate the $12000 into 2015 dollars.

JonboyE

In BC the starting point is usually $7,000 plus 2.5% or 3% of the price above $100,000. This is an all inclusive fee and the agent will cover all the costs of listing, advertising, brokerage and the buyer's agent's fees. It does not all go in his/her jeans.

Like almost everything else, it is negotiable. Realtors are independent business people. You can find people who will sell for much less but you need to check what is and what is not included in the discount realtor's fee.

Novocastrian

As said above, Your Province May Vary, but in Ontario 4-5% is the norm for a "full service" realtor.

Ours was happy with 4% but (if I may be forgiven for bastardising English in the North American style) I chose to incentivise her by suggesting that her commission would increase to 10% on the marginal amount over the listing price that she could squeeze out of the deal. We all ended up happy.

Souvy

C$4k in 1993 is C$6,234.56 in deflated 2015 terms.

Approximately.

Novocastrian

Not when applied to house prices in the GTA.

But yiou know that and are being wantonly pedantic.

Souvy

Noi I'm not.

I merely stuck 4k in 1993 into my spreadsheet model with 2015 as the base year and the answer popped out.

It's probably wrong. Our sodding economist won't let the rest of us have access to the underlying sums and he hasn't changed the GDP inputs for a while.

withabix

In a rising sellers' market, Realtors get a lot of money for doing virtually nothing.

When we were buying, the Realtor we were using didn't do much either other than write up an offer, as we had basically picked out most of the houses to view in the first place (including the one we bought). His wife was our mortgage broker too! We found him & her and it was more for convenience than anything else.

He wasn't very keen on taking us round houses that were being marketed by the discount realtors (One Percent Realty, Property Guys etc) because there wasn't much in it for him, but he did.

We did get about $5k off the listing price (that had already been reduced by $30k the day before), but that was 12 months ago in a fairly slow winter market, when the market here wasn't as crazy as it is now. Everything is currently going for 5-10% above listing price, within days of going on the market and every house listed is getting listed at just below the sale price of the one that went before.

The market is crazy here right now - people are selling up and moving just because of the prices being achieved. Not sure where they are going (upwards or further east), but there is tons of demand for single family homes....

Most of the sellers have been in the houses for about 5 years (from new), but some are being flipped by people who moved last year because of the 30/35/40% increases being achieved over the first half of 2015.

It is crazy and can't possibly continue.....

Alan2005

It was inevitable really. MR is one of the few places left in the Metro Vancouver area that is relatively affordable whilst still being (just about) commutable to Vancouver if you have the stomach for it. So much new stuff is being built too, 240th is completely different to how it was even 3 years ago.

We've had quite a few of those postcards from realtors saying that they have buyers waiting, so supply is probably a bit limited. Maybe it won't last, but prices here hadn't really moved much until these recent increases.