Ok My .02cents and I am a realtor.

Do you need a realtor? NO

Now my take on this is that there is a potential 3% of 500k that you either
need to negotiate off of the sale price or.....

Could I suggest that you take the applicable classes approx 4 either
classroom or correspondence (easy) and become a licensed realtor yourself.
Approx cost $1,000 then you do the looking / investigating and when you find
a house you like you handle your whole side of the transaction.

Now the benefit to this is at closing you walk away with the 15K minus any
fees to your sponsoring broker (find a low monthly fee approx $80/month,
100% commission sponsoring broker) and you purchase your house and you have
15k to spend on......

Just my .02cents and if you live in Texas I can point you in the direction
to your real estate license. Just to provide a little background I have my
real estate license and use it not only to buy my primary residences but
also to locate investment property so I make 3% on the buy and save 3% on
the sell and it add's up.

Ok all the best to you.

FSJ
"cmay" wrote in message
ups.com...
I am in the process of looking for and buying my second house.

The first time around we used an agent, but they were totally useless.

Now before I get a bunch of replies from agents talking about all the
stuff they provide their clients like me clarify a few things:

1) I don't need an agent to help me find properites
2) I know that any agent I use is really just working to make the sale
happen, working to get me to buy a house, even if it is a bad deal (or
bad house).
3) An attorney will take care of all legal issues I have.
4) I am not willing to pay an agent to be my buyers agent just to get
them to actually represent me, and not the sale.


Ok, so now that thats out of the way...


The last time, the only thing the agent did was get us physical access
to the houses we were interested in.


Now if I were selling a house, I would not be thinking about using an
agent, but because I am BUYING a house, I am wondering if there is any
reason to NOT use an agent.

If I buy a 500k house, that means something around 15k is going to go
to my agent. If I don't have an agent, that 15k just goes back to the
sellers agent, so it isn't like I am going to be saving myself any
money.


Does anyone have a point of view on this?