Occam's Razor

Having recently completed a half-million dollar transaction (the sale of our house) I have been pondering the HUD-1 form we got at settlement. This is a standard form issued by the settlement agency that indicates all the costs of the buying and selling transaction. If a form could stink, this one would stink, at least a little.

Clearly commissions cost money, and the seller typically pays the commissions, both for the listing agent and the buyer’s agent. Traditionally this was six percent of the sale, split equally between agents. In recent years most realtors seems ready to bargain with sellers, perhaps because home prices are so inflated now. 5% is probably typical these days. Some sellers bargain for 4% and probably wonder if they get the same quality of service for this price. Some may get less than that. Our listing agent said she would take 2% in commission, so we agreed to pay 5%, with the buyer’s agent getting 3%. More than once I raised the fairness issue with our agent. She did most of the work and got 2% while the buyer’s agent earned more. She shrugged. That’s the way it goes. She often acts as a buyer’s agent and comes out ahead in those transactions.

Anyhow, the HUD-1 lays it all out. Since we sold the house for $505,000, our agent got $10,100 and the buyer’s agent got $15,150. Nice money if you can get it. But the buyer’s agent didn’t get $15,150. Unknown to us until settlement was the figure in the buyer’s column on Line 205. It’s called “Realtor credit” and it showed $7,000. This is money that the buyer’s agent will give back to the buyer for the privilege of being their agent. So she really got $8,150 from us for the sale of our house, and gave $7,000 of her $15,150 to the seller.

This means in effect that the buyer bought our house for $505,000 but really paid only $498,000 for the property. And this was because we were not savvy enough in the real estate trade to know we should try to discount the commission because the buyer would get a kickback, sorry a credit from his agent.

I am at once upset about this and wanting to shake our buyer’s hand. He’s one crafty dude. It’s not just us whose pocket he picked without us even knowing. He also got a kickback, sorry a credit from his lender (line 204), for $1000. Yes, for the privilege of taking out a loan with PrimeLending of Dallas, Texas, they gave him $1000 at settlement, which means in effect he paid only $497,000 for our $505,000 house. To the buyer’s credit, he did put 22% down in cash and financed the rest. Perhaps that had something to do with the credit.

Of course neither my wife nor I at any time knew we were effectively giving $7000 to the buyer. There was no piece of paper with the offer that said anything about this at all. Maybe there should be. We had two competing offers on the table, both for full price. Maybe we would have accepted the other one had we known. Or maybe we would have countered and asked for a credit from the buyer too. We could have asked for a higher asking price, of course, I just didn’t know these details.

What’s missing is transparency. These credits/kickbacks really affected the entire real estate purchase. Without them the buyer might not have made us an offer, or perhaps he would have raised his offer. We were just in ignorance.

The buyer’s agent just happens to be the top selling agent at our agent’s office. She has found a profitable niche. You see she is Indian and caters to the Indian community. Asians including many Indians are rapidly moving into our former zip code. I looked up the census data, and Asians went from 15% to 30% of our population between the 2000 and 2010 census, so it’s a growing market. There’s nothing wrong with this of course. Indians are likely to ask around mostly inside of their community when looking for an agent. Most likely they heard about her and heard that she offered generous credits on her commissions. In this case, it was a very generous credit, as $7000 is 46% of the money she could have gotten from us if she hadn’t kicked it back.

What she does get to do is to count the $505,000 sales price of our former house to her yearly sales total. It helps make her the #1 agent in that office. Doubtless nowhere in her marketing material is she calling attention to the fact that while she was one of two agents in the sale, she effectively earned a commission of 1.6%. So our agent really made more from the deal. The effect of our sale was that 3.6% was paid in commissions, but we were charged a 5% commission. We apparently gave the buyer a 1.4% rebate, but it’s not listed anywhere. The HUD-1 form at least provides this transparency; it just came too late to be useful.

I’m unlikely to do many more house sales in my lifetime. But if there is a next time I will be more wary. I will relate my experience to my new agent and suggest because we were effectively discounted, maybe 2% for each agent is appropriate. At least that way the buyer pays a higher percentage of the actual house sale, which will end up in our bank account. What I really want is all these details in the offer up front. I know I’m probably Don Quixote pointing my lance at a windmill on this issue.

So it’s too late for me, but not for you:

• Sellers: if you are planning to sell your home you can at least be wise to what’s going on behind the scenes. Perhaps say you don’t want to pay more than 4% in commissions because you know it is likely that the buyer’s agent will give the buyer a credit.
• Buyers: find an agent with both a good record of finding people the homes they want at a good price and who is willing to give you a substantial credit on their commission. Apparently 40 or 50 percent is not an unreasonable credit.

If this information is valuable to you, please send me 1.4% of the sale price. Thanks.