Although I spent 50 years in real estate, finance, and appraisal, I retired 4 years ago. When I needed to sell my mother’s home in southern California I hired a great real estate team to do it. They helped get rid of all of mom’s stuff, had the home deep cleaned, acted a a general contractor for all of the repairs and got me great deals, professionally staged the home with their furniture, took truly awesome professional photos, held it open the first weekend, and marketed the home worldwide. 6 days after it went on the market it was sold with multiple offers, for top dollar, in what the naysayers claim is a “crashing” market. The entire process took less than sixty days and I didn’t have to leave Montana once. They handled it all. The total commission (5% of $780,000) was more than earned and I took more to the bank for mom that I could have by trying to do it myself, even with 5 decades of experience. Commissions are normally split between listing agent and selling agent and their respective offices and franchisors. The franchises take a cut off the top before the commissions are split between the office and the agents. In “by owner” sales, the commission that would normally be paid to pros is normally just subtracted by the buyer when they know there isn’t one. And you get to do everything yourself.
I vetted the team I hired well by analyzing all of their sales from the first of the year. It totaled over 60 million in sales. So I’d say they are doing fine even though it is split more ways than most can probably imagine. Although Chicken Little told me the market was “crashing”, the Realtors didn’t think so, and that sure wasn’t my experience. Maybe the market being down meant I got three offers in the first week instead of 30. Really, if you’ve ever sold a home before, who wants to have to deal with 30 offers?
