Why do most agents make home buying seem so complicated?

Regardless of what most agents and firms want you to believe home buying is a simple process. ShopProp through our proven process has represented thousands of clients from 10 million dollar transactions to under 1 million. Our proven process is the same for each transaction and we rebate our client's thousands of dollars and in some cases 100s of thousands in commissions.

Most agents get in the way of an efficient market for home buyers and sellers. Most agents in firms will do their best to make home-buying appear to be as difficult as they can in order to charge a high commission. Some of your friends and family will have fallen prey to these agents and their con game and most people will defend why they had to pay the high commission parroting back what their agent told them. 

Let's start by being honest. You pay a commission when you buy or sell a home. Just because for the last 70 years the real estate industry has done their best to con the public into believing that ONLY the seller pays the commission if you are here chances are you are smart enough to see through that lie. If the agent representing you on the purchase is being paid a 2.5-3% commission on the purchase price of your home, who paid the commission? It does not 

Let me preface this with not ALL agents use scare tactics, collude, and coerce clients but I am sorry to say they are out there. The most interesting thing is the agents that claim to be the best and tell you this is why they charge a high commission, are exactly the ones that try to close off the market and keep commissions high. That being said there are great agents and firms. Also, I know from experience that there is work involved when it comes to buying or selling a home and people have the right to charge and to pay as much commission as they want. I am however against anyone that tries to employ tactics to close off the market for the sole purpose of charging higher fees.

The good news is that I don’t know of one home buyer that if they would have written the offer on the home they purchased with ShopProp versus another agent not only would have won the bid but also received a huge rebate! I also don’t know of a home seller that left our firm to list with another company and achieved a higher price. I don’t know of any firm or agent that consistently achieves higher prices than its peers even though they may claim to with padded data. So if you are selling your home you don’t have to be coerced into paying a high commission. That being said below are some abuses you should be aware of.

You can easily establish if your real estate agent is a predatory agent and part of the effort to close the market off to the public so they and the industry can keep commissions high by the tactics they use. Do they:

• Tell you that only the seller pays the commission? Don’t tell you you can share in the commission when buying a home?
• When selling your home they operate as a dual agent or have someone in their office/company act as a dual agent and get paid two commissions, the listing, and the buying agent commission. These agents will set up frontman and call them buying agents, but in actuality, it is simply another person on their team or office that is being paid a commission. I can tell you for a fact that this charade has cost homeowners billions. Often these agents will not do their best to represent you and are more concerned about collecting two commissions. At ShopProp you will notice when we operate as a dual agent our clients only pay the listing side (1 commission). These predatory will also make false claims like they sold the homes they listed when in actuality they listed it and another agent brought the buyer.
• Tell you how they have an in with other agents and somehow you will get a better price? Tell you agents won’t work with certain agents or take certain offers.
• Tell you how complicated and risky buying or selling a home is? Try to scare you into thinking that some offers get better consideration than other offers.
• Try to scare you into the idea that agents will not show certain listings? Tell you that you have to work with a local agent or a particular agent to get the best price when buying or selling. Limited service companies/platform companies where there is no commission offered are exceptions because there is no incentive for the agent.
• Tell you they have pocket listings or do they belong to some kind of insider listing service? Make false claims of getting higher prices with padded data.
• Tell you they will buy your property so you can avoid the trouble of listing your property. The interesting thing is real estate agents would never dream of selling their own home without listing it on the open market and offering a buyer's agent commission for max exposure.

Since 2006 Our Mission has been to create an open and transparent real estate market where it doesn't cost home sellers and buyers a fortune to buy and sell their homes. Please help us fight agents that are violating Anti Trust Laws by reporting to us any behavior that might be in violation. We have won arbitration cases on our client's behalf against agents that violate Anti Trust. Agents are not allowed to collude against other brokerage firms.