I did some google-ing for you. I found that you can go to his Broker (Assuming he has one) and lodge a formal complaint and ask for another agent within the brokerage. Or you could simply tell him you're no longer comfortable with this and want him to refer you to another agent.
I know he is angry with me for backing out of the one house, even though it was nice, after I thought about it the backyard was just too small. So I am sure the whole evening he is going to make me feel stupid and push me into a house I really don't want to live in. This is a big investment for me and I don't like how he is treating me.
Before dinner write down your basic requirements. Tell him to call you if he finds them in your price range. That should shut him up but expect him to try anyway. If he does and the house does not meet your needs remind him he wasted YOUR time.
I'm sorry about the 6 months but life seems often to consist of hard lessons.
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I'll believe corporations are persons when Texas executes one.: LBJ's Ghost
Before dinner write down your basic requirements. Tell him to call you if he finds them in your price range. That should shut him up but expect him to try anyway. If he does and the house does not meet your needs remind him he wasted YOUR time.
I'm sorry about the 6 months but life seems often to consist of hard lessons.
Oh he doesn't find homes for me. He has some program that I enter my price range and area etc... then I get updates via email and asks me if I am interested or not. lol He does n-o-t-h-i-n-g!
Oh he doesn't find homes for me. He has some program that I enter my price range and area etc... then I get updates via email and asks me if I am interested or not. lol He does n-o-t-h-i-n-g!
Oh, god. I had an agent like this once. In fact, she STILL sends me emails after I've requested she stop years ago.
Everything he's doing, you can do on your own. I'm sorry this has been a bad experience for you.
He said then why would you have me go through all this work if you were not serious.
How are you supposed to know if you like a house (and its yard) unless you go to the house and take the time to assess its suitability?
But that is what I have found, they have a number, and if you want to see more houses than that, they feel you are wasting their time, yet it is their fault for not understanding your needs, instead of finding and showing houses you would find satisfactory, they would like you to accept the first house they show. Definitely not professional.
That was the problem with both of the agents we fired, they didn't want to go out of their way to show a house you may like, and in fact, they wasted our time by "showing" us houses they knew didn't fit us, but they wanted to see the houses and since it was in the vicinity of a house we may have been interested in, they took a detour and didn't care if that inconvenienced us.
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I am getting some real bad vibes from this and don't know what to do or how to get out of this. He has not been real helpful helping me find a house. He says he doesn't want to hurt his rep by offering bids lower than what the seller is asking for the house.
He was obviously just lazy, houses, especially if they aren't brand new, don't have a set price, it is based on what the market will bear, and the only way to find that out is to ask a higher price than you are actually willing to sell your current house, and when buying, offer lower than you were willing to pay. If all goes well, you can settle on a happy medium, but dealing with all that to and fro is what the agent is supposedly being paid to do on your behalf.
And to claim it would hurt his rep to offer a "lower than asking price" bid is just BS, that should really hurt his rep with buyers he claims to represent.
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What can I do to get out of this?
Basically what we did is document where the agents did not fulfill their end of the contract. In addition to the above, one agent only advertised our house on his own website, not even on his company's link, and the advertising had many shortcomings; he showed one less bedroom, one less bathroom, and although we had a large living room upstairs and a large family down, he did not list the living room, so potential buyers who wanted the extra rooms would think the house was too small for them. He also put "N/A" in the space where he should have listed that we have a garage, again something that is crucial for some people, but even when we pointed out these shortcomings, the ads didn't get updated. Only when we finally fired him, did he say that he could make the corrections very quickly. He of course had no answer as to why he didn't make the corrections when first pointed out.
By documenting these and some other issues, we showed that the agents broke the contract, not us, and so we were free to look elsewhere without they being able to claim even a portion of any commissions.
Luckily, I had the foresight to take screenshots of the ad, because as I suspected, once he was in receipt of the letter firing him, he did make the changes he should have had correct in the first place, or at least he should have made those changes when first notified of his errors.
And it was also vital to send a copy of the correspondence to his manager.
He was obviously just lazy, houses, especially if they aren't brand new, don't have a set price, it is based on what the market will bear, and the only way to find that out is to ask a higher price than you are actually willing to sell your current house, and when buying, offer lower than you were willing to pay. If all goes well, you can settle on a happy medium, but dealing with all that to and fro is what the agent is supposedly being paid to do on your behalf.
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The home values are based on the comps in the area, which I understand. On the other hand some of the houses were priced too high. He said he agreed but it would insult the owner and hurt his reputation by low balling.
It was not like I was asking him to go 50k lower or more, it would only be 10-20k. I saw houses he told me to forget about and now 4 months later I did see them sell for 40-50k lower. I confronted him on that and said that probably an investor bought some of those homes and paid with cash.
The home values are based on the comps in the area, which I understand.
Yes, generally they average out the selling prices of similar housing, but unless the lots, the houses and the view, (or lack of view) are exactly the same, the true market values will vary. And since most sellers want as much as they can get, they ask a higher than fair price, and will still be happy with a lower offer, though of course they welcome with open arms the sucker, I mean buyer willing to pay the full asking price.
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On the other hand some of the houses were priced too high. He said he agreed but it would insult the owner and hurt his reputation by low balling.
But of course is he not insulting you by trying to pressure you to pay too much?
And of course he wouldn't be swayed by the larger commission based on the higher selling price.
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It was not like I was asking him to go 50k lower or more, it would only be 10-20k. I saw houses he told me to forget about and now 4 months later I did see them sell for 40-50k lower. I confronted him on that and said that probably an investor bought some of those homes and paid with cash.
Boy, can he spin the facts any more? First off, the agent was probably quite aware already of the final purchase prices, and who bought those houses, so the "probably an investor bought some of them" story is just that, a fictional story.
And as far as paying cash goes, if you get a mortgage on the house, the seller gets the cash just the same as if you had the cash hidden in your pillow, unless he is willing to provide said mortgage. Makes sense to a seller who has enough cash stored somewhere not to need cash from the sale of the house as he then earns interest on that money, with the house as collateral, with little to no risk on his part.
Same thing if you can take over his mortgage, he has that debt wiped clean, the same as if he received cash with which he would have paid it off.
In none of these scenarios do I see any benefit to a seller to drop 40-50K just because he is getting "cash".
I was even pressured to accept a much lower offer than I was led to believe was the fair price just because there was a lowball offer on a "comparable" house. It wasn?t accepted, but we were supposed to drop our price due to just the offer being on the table, if indeed there was such an offer at all. We can only go on the word of the agent, which I know from experience is totally worthless.
My uncle was a real estate agent, and he would tell us stories of how he would tell the seller to leave the appliances in the house, then tell the buyers that he wasn't in the appliance selling business so there was no expectation of appliances being in the house. Guess who wound up with free appliances which he then turned around and sold to other purchasers of appliance "challenged" homes.
Oh he doesn't find homes for me. He has some program that I enter my price range and area etc... then I get updates via email and asks me if I am interested or not. lol He does n-o-t-h-i-n-g!
I think next time, if ever I buy a house again, I won't go thru a buyer's agent. Don't get me wrong my agent wasn't near the nightmare yours seems to be but I also didn't see what exactly she did. Like you she sent me email notifications of homes that fit my search criteria. She also had an abundance of contacts and could answer any question I had in a few hours or a day.
I think it depends on the person. I researched all the houses, went to see them and the neighborhood by myself, then asked her to show them to me. One thing that I thought she did extremely well looking out for my interests, is she told me exactly what she thought of the place. There was no BS from her. She said if she thought homes were overpriced, what problems I could run into, etc. Really no non-sense.
Wow, amazing how one bad realator can fill out 3 pages worth of stufff.
Yes realators can ask you to sign an agreement. You don't realize how much time some realator take with clients, only to have then go to some other agent. This isn't practiced by the really good agents much anymore, but its still out there.
Too bad you got sucked into such a thing, but I bet you won't next time. Also think about the amount of time you and the realator spend looking at, making offers on and counter offers on houses, then the contract work, dealing with loan people, costs involved. Divide that into the commition they get. It might be shocking... It used to be a great bussiness when property values were highter, but not now. Realators are hungry people.
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