This doesn’t top some of the other nonsense we’ve discovered banks pulling, but it’s pretty nasty.
The bank selling the house our buyer fell in love with requires that the buyer’s Realtor reduce their commission (i.e. take a pay cut) if the buyer wants the seller to help pay his/her closing costs or make repairs on the house.
Lots of first time buyers (nearly all, in our experience) have saved money for their down payment but take the opportunity offered by our current market to ask the seller to cover the cost of their closing costs. And lots of bank owned homes need minor repairs before their FHA loan will be approved.
So essentially, if our buyer makes a request made by most home buyers in the field today, the bank will decrease our paycheck? Great. Just great.
*edited to add - after talking w/ my partner Chris this morning about this, I realized my post needed some clarification on 3 points:
First, the Realtors’ Ethics Code says agents can’t ever allow potential commission earnings affect what they advise their clients to do. If our buyer loves a house whose seller is noodling around with our paycheck because they can, and it’s a good house & deal for our client, we have to take the pay cut without comment.
Second, the bank buried this commission information deep within a set of forms buyer is required to submit with his/her purchase offer. The paycheck reduction information isn’t clearly and transparently displayed in the typical spot on the MLS data sheet like everybody else’s commission information.
Third, at the price point our buyer is shopping the bank’s savings via this method is about $125. Bottom line - the bank is being shifty to save a buck and a quarter.
Heather Barr is a Realtor. She's a chow hound, a gym rat, and the only political junkie in the USA who can actually keep her political views to herself. Instead, she focuses on educating her clients about the often-confusing world of residential real estate.
Tagged as:
From the Trenches
Wherein I periodically post about the highest and lowest priced homes in the local MLS. Properties must be:
- single family, detached homes
- bank owned
- currently Active in the ARMLS (AZ Regional Multiple Listing Service)
- located in the general metro Phoenix region (Wickenburg, Florence, Coolidge, etc are excluded but Surprise, Buckeye, Queen Creek, etc are included)
$12,500 – The Value’s in the Land
Once again, a crispy fried special for the guy or gal itching to prove their handyman skills. Seems there’s a lot of those lately. Hmmmm. Former owner rage?
From the MLS description:
Property has been damaged by fire and is sold AS IS. Seller will not make any repairs. PLEASE DO NOT ENTER THE PROPERTY DUE TO SAFETY ISSUES.
The poor house might be hexed. It’s been foreclosed on 3 times since 1992. First, HUD took it back in 1992 and sold it in 1993. A mere two years later it was foreclosed on again, and resold to a new owner. That owner was foreclosed on this past summer and the bank relisted it as a foreclosure/REO property for sale for $31,000 in September. The fire must have happened sometime in September or October, after which the price was dropped to the current $12,500.
$6,500,000 – View in Exclusive Silverleaf Community
13,700 square feet of Italianate luxury. Marble, travertine, barrel vaulted ceilings, etc., ad naseum. Wretched excess at it’s finest. Consumerist Keeping Up with the Joneses to the max.
The land (2.48 acres) was purchased in 2004 for just over a million dollars. The owner tried to sell it as “land + house plans” from December 2006 through May 2007 for $2,600,000. Sometime between May 2007 and May 2009 somebody built the existing home and tried to sell it for $8,900,000.
Mind you, they tried to sell it with no interior photos other than this
Seriously? You want me to shell out nearly $9 million dollars and you’re going to show me only this?
The seller finally dropped their price to $6,950,000 before the bank repossessed it in October 2009. I bet you could get the house from the bank for about $5.5M. ‘Course, it probably needs about a million bucks in finishing and furnishing. Feeling flush? Call me!
View previous Highs and Lows posts
Heather Barr is a Realtor. She's a chow hound, a gym rat, and the only political junkie in the USA who can actually keep her political views to herself. Instead, she focuses on educating her clients about the often-confusing world of residential real estate.
Tagged as:
REO/Bank Owned
