You may wonder who pays the real estate agent when a foreclosed home is purchased. In these economic times there are many foreclosed properties on the market. There are many real estate investors who are buying up homes rehabbing them and selling them for a profit to first time home owners and even to other investors. Some investors are paying as little as thirty cents on the dollar.

They are buying from foreclosed properties or what is known in the real estate industry as an REO. This stands for real estate owned. These are properties that the bank owns because they were foreclosed upon. The buyer or person who took out the loan on the house failed to make the requisite payments and defaulted on the loan and now the bank owns the property.

The problem however is that banks are not in the real property selling business. Banks are in the business of lending money. Now we have banks with a large inventory of foreclosed properties, or REO’s. Because of a very active and influential lobby group in Washington DC, banks cannot sell their foreclosed properties without a real estate agent.

So if you are looking to buy an REO for real estate investment purposes or if you are looking for a home to buy to live in you will have to go through a real estate agent and not deal directly with the bank. And in almost every case the agent will be paid his or her commission from the sale of the house which means that the bank will pay the commission.

However you need to understand that the agent commission is figured into the price of the property. So the buyer will not have to cut a check to the agent but the buyer will be paying for the commission in some form simply because the bank has added part if not all the commission to the sale of the property.

But usually when an agent is acting on the behalf of a bank he or she will not get as high a commission percentage as the real estate agent would when working with a private buyer and not a bank which has more ability to negotiate a lower rate of commission because of the volume of Houses they deal in. Many banks only work with a limited number of agents.

In fact when you contact an agent you might notice that some will list on their business cards that they are REO specialists. If you are looking for a foreclosed property you will want to work with an agent with this specialty. What has been happening recently also is that many banks are actually holding onto many foreclosed properties.

There rationale is that if they release their REO properties little by little they will be able to inflate the prices of their properties and thereby not lose as much money as they would have if they released all their houses at once. The government is frowning on this practice as it is creating a falsely inflated housing market.

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