Confessions From a Real Estate Broker: Why People Hate Realtors®

By Jade Goodhue

I thought being a real estate broker would make selling my own property relatively straightforward. Instead, I got an unexpected education in what happens when the person hired to represent your interests becomes another person you have to negotiate with.

There's something uniquely unsettling about being a real estate broker and discovering that your own real estate transaction is slowly turning into a case study of everything wrong with the industry.

I've spent years advising clients, negotiating contracts, analyzing property values, and navigating the occasional circus that comes with buying and selling real estate.

I've encountered difficult agents, unusual negotiations, and transactions that probably deserved their own psychological evaluations.

But this time, I wasn't representing a client.

I was the client.

And the experience was illuminating.

Not necessarily in the way one hopes.

When Negotiating Becomes an Inconvenience: Pushy Sales Tactics

The prospective buyer of my California property was a licensed real estate agent purchasing the home as an investment.

Nothing unusual about that. Real estate professionals buy investment properties all the time.

What made this interesting was that she was representing herself and requesting a 3% buyer-agent commission, paid by me, the seller. Now the initial shock was because here in Wisconsin, Realtors aren’t allowed to earn a commission on their own deal. Apparently it is in California. Kudos to them!

In effect, the seller was being asked to compensate a buyer who was also negotiating and representing her own interests in the purchase - not on behalf of someone else.

I’m not opposed to it, but certainly something worth considering when evaluating the actual economics of the offer.

My listing agent had a different perspective: “I mean, I would ask for my commission when I’m buying my own house, wouldn’t you?”

My counter - “it depends on the terms of the deal…”

I wasn't convinced the proposed price, terms and commission represented a compelling deal. I wanted to negotiate.

That difference in perspective became even clearer when I proposed negotiating the commission down to 1.5% or 2%.

“We're talking about 2000 bucks.”

My counterproposal was also described as “silly.”

And there it was.

The first indication that my understanding of whose money we were negotiating might differ from my agent's.

To be clear, $2,000 isn't necessarily worth losing a transaction over. There are plenty of circumstances where conceding that amount is strategically sensible.

But the question wasn't whether I could afford to concede it.

The question was whether doing so served my interests. I had hired someone to help me evaluate that distinction. Instead, I found myself explaining why I was entitled to consider it.

An unusual beginning. Unfortunately, we were just getting warmed up.

Questionable Advice: A Philosophy Lesson in Property Valuation

At one point, my agent explained when chatting about a lowball offer: “A home is worth what a buyer is willing to pay. I can want 1M but it doesn't mean you're going to get it.”

This is one of those familiar real estate sayings that contains enough truth to sound convincing, provided nobody examines it too closely.

To be clear, I wasn’t asking for $1M. I had listed the home at the price the agent recommended, and I asked for a price reduction when the property didn’t move.

The point though - of course, wanting $1 million doesn't make a property worth $1 million. Especially if the home is worth $500,000 for example.

But neither does receiving a $400,000 offer make it worth $400,000.

Otherwise, every investor submitting a lowball offer would have the extraordinary ability to revalue real estate simply by expressing an interest in purchasing it.

Appraisers could retire. Comparable market analyses would become obsolete.

We could determine property values by collecting unsolicited offers and selecting whichever one arrived most recently.

I responded: “A home is worth what a buyer is willing to pay AND what a seller is WILLING to relinquish at. Otherwise, every lowball offer would be what a home is worth.”

I'd received other expressions of interest at different price points, including a low ball offer a hundred thousand dollars below asking.

But none of those individual offers, standing alone, established fair market value.

Was I willing to sell for a lower than asking amount? Yes, if that's where the market supported the property.

What I wasn't willing to do was confuse one investor's preferred acquisition price with an objective valuation.

There's an important distinction between what someone offers, what a property is likely worth in the market, and what two parties ultimately agree to exchange it for.

Those numbers can overlap. They aren't automatically identical.

And yes, I understood that time mattered. I had another real estate transaction underway, and timing was an important consideration.

But I wasn't out of time. Nor was this an unconditional cash offer with no inspections.

I also received this cliche: “A bird in the hand being worth two in the bush.”

But I also understood that sometimes no deal is better than a bad deal.

Both concepts can be true. Which one applies depends on the circumstances.

That, I had assumed, was why people hired experienced real estate professionals.

When Confidence Replaces Analysis: The Interest Rate Autopsy

Then the conversation took an unexpected turn into mortgage economics.

The market had changed, and another offer came in—this time approximately $14,000 below my already-reduced asking price.

I didn't dismiss the offer. But I wanted to understand whether the market supported it.

So I asked my agent for the current days on market and the number of comparable condos competing for buyers. I also explained that I wasn't convinced the increase in mortgage rates, by itself, justified such a substantial reduction.

My agent responded: “Yes it can, the increase from 6.5 to 7.5 in interest rate is about 10% in a purchase price so about $30k ish.”

I stared at that one for a moment.

Mortgage rates had apparently acquired the ability to perform instant property appraisals.

A 1% increase in interest rates, and approximately $30,000 of value simply vanished.

No comparable sales required.

No consideration of the property's condition, location, or competing inventory.

Just an interest rate adjustment and a modest financial funeral.

Here's the problem: Borrowing power and property value are not the same thing.

An increase from 6.5% to 7.5% will materially reduce how much a payment-constrained buyer can borrow. Depending on the loan amount and assumptions, that reduction can amount to tens of thousands of dollars.

But that tells us something about the buyer's financing capacity—not necessarily what a particular property is worth.

Consider a cash buyer. They aren't constrained by a mortgage payment. Does that mean the property is suddenly worth $30,000 more to them?

Of course not.

Nor does it mean they're unaffected by rising interest rates. Higher borrowing costs can reduce demand, influence investment returns, and put downward pressure on market prices, even for cash transactions.

But the market determines how much those pressures affect property values—not a universal formula that subtracts a fixed amount every time mortgage rates increase.

If every one-percentage-point increase in mortgage rates automatically reduced property values by a fixed percentage, real estate valuation would be remarkably simple.

We could dispense with comparable sales, competing inventory, absorption rates, property condition, and local market dynamics.

Appraisers could simplify their market analysis and simply consult the latest mortgage rates to adjust property values accordingly.

An extraordinarily efficient system.

Unfortunately, not one supported by how real estate markets actually function.

Interest rates absolutely influence affordability, demand, and ultimately prices. But the relationship is neither uniform nor instantaneous.

And that's precisely why I'd asked for the market data in the first place.

I wasn't arguing that my property was immune to changing market conditions. I was asking whether those conditions supported the price being proposed.

There's a rather significant difference.

Yet somehow, I found myself explaining the distinction between financing capacity and market value to the professional I'd hired to advise me on precisely those matters.

I began to appreciate the irony.

Poor Communication: The Negotiation That Required Its Own Negotiation

By this point, the underlying disagreement wasn't simply about price.

It was about how the transaction was being evaluated and communicated.

I wanted to understand the buyer's actual position, the concessions being requested, and the risks associated with accepting or countering.

I expected those discussions to include objective advice, even when that advice challenged my expectations.

Instead, some of the conversations became unnecessarily contentious.

At one point, I was also told to “simmer.”

Simmer. An interesting word choice.

I usually associate it with reducing a sauce, not resolving a disagreement about fiduciary representation.

I had questions about my transaction.

I had concerns about the financial terms.

I had a different interpretation of the available market evidence.

And I wanted something as ordinary as a showing activity report—information routinely available through showing management software.

None of those things should be particularly alarming in a real estate negotiation.

In fact, they're fairly routine. Having the material information reasonably available is fundamental to making informed decisions about negotiated terms. After all, helping clients understand their options, risks, and potential consequences is one of the central purposes of professional representation.

What was becoming less routine was the amount of energy required to defend my right to ask them. And the amount of information I wasn’t receiving.

When the Client Becomes the Professional: The Contract Conundrum

Negotiations are one thing. The written agreement is another.

After working through the price, commission, closing timeline, and other terms, through email, we finally had a buyer's signed counteroffer to review. That date was particularly important because I was coordinating another real estate transaction.

And here's where the story takes a rather unfortunate turn. My listing agent had insisted that the counteroffer was good to accept as is.

But then I read the rest of the buyer's counteroffer.

It stated: “Buyer accepts SCO1 - dated 10/2/26: with exception of 1 & 3 Q-7”

An interesting sentence. The problem was that the exceptions referenced numbered provisions without clearly identifying which terms were being excluded.

Depending on how those references were interpreted, they could exclude provisions of the seller's counteroffer—including the October 30 closing date—or refer to provisions in the original offer to purchase.

Two very different interpretations, with potentially significant consequences. And the signed document didn't clearly establish which one the buyer intended.

Now, the buyer's accompanying email suggested that the parties were generally aligned on the remaining terms. But the signed counteroffer itself was another matter.

Intention expressed in an email and clarity in the signed agreement are not interchangeable.

Of the three licensed agents involved in the transaction, I was the only client—and somehow, the one insisting that the two agents being compensated clarify the contract before I signed it.

This wasn't a philosophical disagreement over negotiating strategy. It was a question of whether the document I was being advised to accept actually preserved the terms I believed we had negotiated.

A contract should not require an archaeological excavation of emails, text messages, and competing recollections to determine what everyone agreed to.

And yet, there I was, reviewing the language, identifying the potential conflict, and rewriting the counter for the other agent and my agent.

It wasn't particularly complicated: Clarify the exceptions, make sure the other negotiated terms remain intact, and then proceed.

Because the objective wasn't to complicate the transaction. It was to prevent a perfectly avoidable ambiguity from becoming a very expensive problem later.

A modest ambition. By now, however, modest ambitions had become a recurring source of misadventure.

The Part That Actually Bothered Me

There's a temptation to treat experiences like this as amusing stories about difficult personalities. And admittedly, some of the exchanges were absurdly amusing.

But underneath the absurdity was something more consequential.

I knew enough to recognize when an explanation was incomplete, a valuation argument was oversimplified, or a negotiating position deserved closer examination.

I knew that commissions were negotiable. I knew that an investor's offer wasn't necessarily synonymous with market value. I knew the difference between borrowing capacity and property valuation.

And I knew that the terms of a contract deserved careful attention.

What happens to the seller who doesn't know those things?

The person who has never sold a home before?

The widow selling the family house?

The couple relocating under financial pressure?

The homeowner who assumes that because their agent sounds confident, the advice must be correct?

That's where the humor begins to lose some of its charm.

Because people hire professionals precisely to help them navigate situations they don't fully understand.

And when the professional's confidence exceeds the quality of their advice, the client may never realize what they weren't told.

The Difference Between Closing a Deal and Representing a Client

I understand the pressures of this business.

Real estate transactions involve deadlines, uncertainty, emotional decisions, competing interests, and negotiations where nobody gets everything they want.

Sometimes the best advice is to accept an offer below expectations.

Sometimes it's to concede a commission difference.

Sometimes it's to walk away.

There's no universal answer.

But there is a professional standard. A good agent explains the options and the consequences.

• They distinguish facts from assumptions.
• They communicate material information accurately.
• They offer recommendations grounded in evidence rather than convenient generalizations.
• And they respect the client's authority to make the final decision.

An agent can disagree with a client without becoming another adversary in the transaction.

That's an important distinction. And one that seems to get lost surprisingly often.

The purpose of representation isn't to persuade the client to accept the agent's preferred outcome. It's to equip the client to make an informed decision about their own outcome.

So, Why Do People Hate Realtors?

I don't think it's necessarily the commissions.

Certainly, people question what Realtors earn. And when the compensation amounts to thousands—or tens of thousands—of dollars, it's reasonable to expect that the expertise, diligence, and representation justify the expense.

But I suspect the resentment runs deeper than the amount on the closing statement.

It's the poor communication. The unanswered questions, the information that isn't forthcoming, and the feeling that asking for clarification has somehow become an inconvenience.

It's the gap between what was promised—or reasonably expected—and what was actually delivered. The professional expertise you thought you were hiring, only to discover that you're the one supplying much of it.

It's the pressure to accept an offer, concede a negotiating position, or simply move forward, without a convincing explanation of why doing so serves your interests.

And perhaps most troubling, it's the gradual erosion of the client's authority over their own transaction. When reasonable questions become obstacles, disagreement becomes hostility, and the person you've hired to advocate for you begins to feel like another person you have to negotiate against.

It's the experience of paying someone to represent you and then feeling as though you're navigating the transaction alone.

For the first time, I understood the appeal of limited-service representation. If I was going to handle the analysis, negotiate the terms, and scrutinize the contract myself, I might as well have saved the money and known what I was signing up for.

And perhaps most frustrating of all, these experiences diminish public confidence in an industry filled with genuinely excellent professionals.

Because there are excellent Realtors. And a well priced professional can still be worth every penny.

I've worked with many of them.

People who are knowledgeable, thoughtful, meticulous, ethical, and extraordinarily good at protecting their clients' interests.

Those professionals deserve recognition.

And they deserve an industry whose standards reflect the responsibility that comes with representing someone's home, investment, or financial future.

The Unexpected Takeaway

I eventually came away from the experience with something valuable.

Not a new understanding of real estate. But a renewed appreciation for how vulnerable a client can feel when they aren't confident that their agent is truly in their corner.

It's one thing to teach agents about representation, communication, negotiation, and professional responsibility. It's another to experience the consequences of their absence from the other side of the table.

And that perspective is worth remembering.

Because the real measure of an agent isn't how confidently they explain why a client should accept an offer. It's how effectively they help that client understand whether accepting it is actually the right decision.

And when you find yourself negotiating against your own agent and auditing the contract they recommended you sign—all while paying for the privilege—something has gone rather spectacularly wrong.