Buy Homes & Get Rebate

How do you do market research?

First of all, ask yourself what do you want from a house. Do you value a short commute time, or space for a growing family, or a good school district for your children, or a potential to flip the house for profit? Then research different neighborhoods.

As they say, location is the most important feature of a house. Which neighborhood you choose will directly affects your future lifestyle. When you have a vague idea of what properties might interest you, go to different open houses to get a feel. You’ll get first hand experience of further details of different properties, e.g. street parking, neighbors, yard work, oldness or newness, smells, sun exposure, room layouts, etc. Then you’ll further narrow down what you like and what you can’t tolerate.

We recommend set up a search alert on real estate websites, like Realtor.com or Redfin.com, so you’ll get notified immediately when new properties hit the market. Of course, we can also help you set up an MLS alert if you so desire.

With that said, we are not hanging you out to dry! We hold free consultations to identify your need, give recommendations, strategies. And we are always just a message or phone call away.

Buying a home involves many parties. Depending on whether you need a mortgage, there are different fees to take into consideration when you are setting your budget.

Most of the these fees exist whether you take a loan or not:

• Attorney fee
• Title settlement fee
• Recording fee
• Transfer tax
• Hazard insurance
• Inspection fee

When you take a loan, the bank or other financial institution will charge some or all of the following fees:

• Loan point
• Rate lock fee
• Underwriting fee
• Credit check
• Appraisal fee
• Title insurance
• Flood zone search
• Documentation fee
• Courier fee
• Property tax escrow
• Prepaid interest

Then how much closing fee should one expect? Not that we don’t want to give a number, but the reality is, there are so many different situations that makes the closing fee swing wildly from one property to the next. Any “ball park” figure could be so far off from the reality that it’s misleading. You may see an estimate of 2% – 5% of purchase price for most properties. But depend on your credit, the Bank fees could be over 3%. If the property tax is very high or very low, it could tilt your closing cost heavily. It should be noted that although the property tax and insurance escrow at closing are not necessarily “lending fees” as you have to pay them anyway, Banks usually require some extra money as their reserve, although refundable in the future. So those have to come our of your pocket at closing.

The bottom line is, all fees are eclipsed by realtor fees. And with our rebate, you can expect much less burden at closing.

1. Before everything, make sure you have a loan pre-approval or sufficient fund.
2. You identify the properties you would like to visit.
3. We will set up the showings for you.
4. We provide pricing consultations for the properties you are interested in.
5. Once you decide on a property you like, we will help you prepare an offer and present to the seller.
6. We will negotiate with the seller for your interest.
7. Rest assured all confidential information you provided us are confidential forever.
8. You’ve got a contract!
9. You need to pay the earnest money.
10. We will help you arrange an inspection.
11. We will coordinate with the attorney for contract review.
12. We will coordinate with the Bank for appraisal.
    
13. We will further negotiate on your behalf based on inspection results.
14. Your loan is approved.
15. Closing date is set. We will let you know what to prepare for closing.
16. We will coordinate for you to do a final walk through of the property.
17. Closing day.
18. We will send you a rebate check.

There are two scenarios to your question.

First, it is the law in Illinois that requires minimum services provided by one realtor representing his client. That means, if we represent you in this transaction, we are obligated to provide a bundle of service (drafting contract, negotiation, closing coordination, etc). It is only through our representation that we could get my commission, and provide you with maximum rebate.

The second scenario is we only provide consultation service on drafting the contract, which we think is your target. However, we wouldn’t be “representing” you as agent to client. (We will cut the crap where other realtors will talk about not acting out of your interest without representation) The key problem here is that the Seller’s realtor, seeing there’s no Buyer’s realtor, will keep all commission (6%) to himself, or they’ll push to represent you as a dual agent. Occasionally, you can negotiate directly with the Seller’s realtor to let him refund you. But we’ve never seen a realtor willing to let go as much as our rebate.

There is no fee to start working with us. But as you see, with properties in different price range, we have a limited number of free showings available. If you used up the free showings and need more showings, there will be a charge of $50 per showing. This is to ensure that our agents are compensated for their time due to our extreme low cost structure. The showing fees are non-refundable.

If the deal closes successfully, buyer doesn’t need to pay out of pocket, as the remaining of the fee will be collected at closing. Buyer will get a rebate after we clear the closing check.

If we’ve worked on a transaction for a while and the buyer decides to cancel, it will depend on the substance of our work. To prevent abuse, we would need to be compensated fairly. But if the cancellation is a result of our fault or negligence, there’s no charge.

Simply put, too high a fee for unnecessarily wasted time.

Traditionally, people rely on realtors to recommend properties to them, and arrange showings (think of the days when property listings are kept in the local realtor’s big book…) Some people would even see hundreds of houses before making a decision, and maybe they decide not to buy, or not to buy with this realtor. The poor realtor, having worked for months counting on the deal closing to get the commission, ended up not being compensated at all. It was precisely because of this reason that realtors charge an exorbitant fee since they need to hedge for those people leaning heavily on them.

But today, we have so much information available online. Property listing websites have rendered the traditional realtor’s “property finding” service obsolete, and made finding a home much easier. Then it doesn’t make any sense to charge the buyers the old fee when realtors don’t provide the old services.