Comment by robocat

> Stupid damn realtor!

Not actually.

As a buyer, look for bad realtors and use them. Many will screw over their vendor, and you can use that to your advantage as a buyer.

Sucks to be selling and as you have learnt, you need to corral your realtor or they will do what is financially sensible for themselves.

A realtor has a strong income incentive to get property sold at any price because their income increases a lot with each sale. So they want sales volume and velocity. They also want to reduce the time they waste for each property (especially open homes) and they want to reduce risks of no sale.

Example: a $1M home with a 3% fee. They would rather sell it at $900k and get their $27k commission quickly as possible, rather than use a riskier strategy plus waste more of their time to try and sell at $1.1M to get $33k commission. If it takes them 2x the work to get a few percent more commission, their incentive is to do less work and sell 2x as many houses to get 100% more on commission.