And then this Bloomberg story today. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aGYlBrRCgtq0&refer=home I say, real estate brokers were at least as guilty as the mortgage repackagers and other vermin. House Pimps, trying to say they are now VICTIMS because the gravy train is gone. RE has to be the biggest scam going with absurd fees, and no oversight.
Purge the middle, no need for it in any line of business. Educated consumers don't need middle men, but the middle realizes the general mass is ignorant and thus corruption ensues upon the ignorant.
Exactly...... Boiler plate agreements.... ............................................................... Transferring a little bit of ink to paper merits several percent of the price..... It is rediculous.....
Realtors and mortgage brokers are the biggest scum of any vocations - far, far worse than used car salesmen. They are now up shits creek w/out a paddle, and it couldn't happen to a more useless pool of scum. They did nothing of value, were paid commissions of 6% or more to 'show' homes that sold themselves in hot markets (at multi-million dollar price points), and the mortgage brokers were in on the scam, lining up liar loans and bidding up the value of shacks in Compton to nosebleed levels, partially leading to the biggest bubble in the history of the world - the one that tax payers are being forced to deal with by way of their wise legislators (not). May they all rot in hell. If you see one of them working the drying station at the car wash or behind the counter at McDonald's, make sure to insult them.
the entire process is lame. you're paying tens of thousands of dollars for someone to drive you around and fill out some docs. give me a break. they argued that the process is needed to protect the buyer. well, tell me how well that worked for the 100,000+ people who are being foreclosed on. the nar is a joke
I read about a gal that was closing 30 houses a month for a few months in a really hot market... she was probably earning the cash price of a house every month... I'd say why complain about them, next time the market heats up get a RE license and cash in. People think history won't repeat itself if they bitch, ridiculous, LOL... the reason to learn history is not so it won't repeat itself, it's so you can be on the right side of the trade next time...
Mortgage brokers were worse. Collusion to lie on a mortgage app is a crime if I'm not mistaken. Time in boof them up the ass prison should be their lot.
This has got to be the most ignorant, venomous thread I have ever seen here. Yeah sure, everyone is a victim of the evil real estate people. Do you at all understand supply and demand? Do you at all believe in personal responsibility when conducting major business, you commie pinko morons? Apparently, most of you who have posted so far are too fucking stupid to understand that PUBLIC DEMAND (and excess cheap Greenspan money) drove the housing bubble. End of story. People were BEGGING to buy houses. They were making multiple offers at midnight. Houses were selling so fast that the agents didn't even get the sign up after the house was listed. Buyers were BEGGING to get into any loan that would work so that they could buy a house. Of course the lending markets accomodated this demand, that is what markets always do eventually. In my state, a new build house would often go up $50,000 in the six months it took to finish the construction. Real estate agents or loan officers do not set prices on houses or structure financial products, they work with what is available. Who wouldn't? The market is what people will pay or sign up for. The last prior comparable sale is what sets the next house price. The next loan is based off of what standards are operative at the time. I know many folks in both real estate and mortgages, the majority of them are hard working, professional and decent folks. The reason they get paid big per transaction is to make up for all the time that people waste on looking at houses without intent to buy, they cancel contracts after making offers and generally jack them off for weeks or months, wasting huge amounts of their time and then not buying anything. They don't get paid by the hour or on salary. And they have a lot of expenses since they are self-employed/1099. They sometimes work with many clients for weeks or months before they make one sale, with expenses the whole time. And then they have to put up with peoples whining, stupidity, buyer's remorse and unreasonable demands for a month or two until the closing. And when it was booming, they worked 80 hour weeks to keep up. I saw it for myself. If they were unnecessary to the process, they would have died out long ago. But all of the discount, do-it-yourself real estate companies have all gone out of business over and over again. The "For Sale by Owner" transactions make up less than 5% of real estate sales, because to sell something for $250k requires skills and marketing and negotiation that most people just don't have. Until you have driven around some moron family that can't make up their mind for a few months looking at houses, only to have them decide to not buy, can you then judge how hard being an agent is. The failure rate of people who get their license and then can't hack it and quit is quite high. All this being said, I'm not sitting here and saying that things didn't get out of hand. Of course it did, especially the last year or two before the slide. But for every story you have ever heard about a shady real estate transaction, there are about 1,000 that went just fine. Millions of homes buy/sell each year with no trouble. So quit being the victim and blaming the wrong people for why things went the way they did. It was PUBLIC greed and desire that drove the whole engine. Without this, none of it could have ever happened.
Couldn't agree more, Slapshot. Most of these ignorant idiots don't have a clue what kind of work you have to go through being a realtor - especially during the down market. It's like blaming daytraders for tech bubbles - plain ignorant. And the Bloomberg story? Media sensationalism anyone? 1 bad realtor = every realtors are bad? Come on.