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0 pointsrtpg8y ago0 comments

>You can, with a modicum of effort, learn the market as well or better than a real estate agent

This is the sort of reasoning that people say that pay for the used car salesman's boat.

You are going to buy, what, 5 houses in your life? If you're a big mover.

Real estate agents spend their entire life doing the thing you do once every couple of years at most. Why do you think you'd be better than them?

This is like saying that you, as the person who walked out of a 48-hour boot camp, can code that JS program better than the veteran programmer because she doesn't specialize in Javascript.

You want to spend 6 months doing research? Real estate agents are spending years! There's a bit of principle-agent problems when working in this, but still. Beyond the information parity, there's simply knowing how to do sales and getting people to sign the contract.

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OrwellianChild8y ago

It sounds like you haven't been in the presence of incompetent real estate agents... (which is good!) Anecdotally, however, by being in the market for housing for about 18 months, my level of knowledge and preparedness about individual properties, their attributes, and their value is now exceeding 80% of the agents I speak with. This is in Seattle, mind you, where prices are increasing off the charts. In a volatile market like this, it's harder for agents to learn their market and then rest on their laurels, so many fall behind.

sulam8y ago

I used to know how applets worked really well. That knowledge isn't so useful anymore.

Real estate agents have the same problem.

Of course they know more than I do about the process of buying a house. But knowing whether a house is worth more than asking and roughly how much over -- I can learn that specific piece of info for the houses I care about and my knowledge will be roughly equivalent.

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