So just starting with the obvious; this is a reality show that follows a group of realtors who work with really, really expensive homes in the Hamptons. A single commission on one of these homes is probably many times your annual salary, so needless to say it's an incredibly competitive field where realtors might spend tens of thousands staging a home to appeal to a particular type of buyer like "Wall Street financier" or "tech geek" and showing a home might involve throwing a beach party so that perspective buyers can see what it would be like if it was their house.
Fair warning, this gets a little long and rambling, so just jump to the last paragraph for the tl;dr.
According to the show, 80% of the homes in these high end markets are basically vacation homes for one percenters, so the home owners tend to be of a type. Wealthy, of course, but also used to being catered to and pampered. Polite, but in that polite society 'I'm going to smile to your face and talk about you behind our back' kind of way. Basically your stereotypical entitled rich person.
The realtors on the other hand, they're....well, they're just the worst. Being entitled is the natural state of being for rich people, but the realtors aren't rich, just wannabe rich. But dealing closely with wealth and privilege can cause those who wish they were wealthy and privileged to act as though it's all but a done deal that they will be themselves soon enough. They've met rich people and realized that rich people are just plain old humans; they compare those people with themselves and figure 'hey, why not me; I'm just as good looking and smart' and so on. Before you know it someone who barely graduated from high school will happily lecture others on, say, investment strategy, with supreme confidence.
There are, however, some interesting moments in the show. Beyond just the house porn, that is. One thing that you get to observe is how high-value properties are sold. Beyond a certain price, the value of an extremely high-end home is open to a certain amount of interpretation. Traditional real estate uses "comps", or comparables, to set a value range for a property. Age of the building, acreage, square feet, construction quality and material, etc. But that generally works because you can find other properties with similar qualities and observe what they sold for. With luxury properties it's not as easy because there isn't an agreed upon list of features with known values. What's the value of being on the beach? How about an amazing view? Or a unique architectural design?
This comes up in an episode where a home is being listed for $35 million. As is common in these kind of markets, realtors at the firm will help close a coworkers listing by reaching out to their contacts to see if they know a potential buyer. If their contact buys the building, they have some agreed upon split of the commission between the listing agent and the buyer's agent. But it's a little more complicated than just closing a sale. A realtor acting as the seller's agent has a little pull in swaying the home owner towards a bid, but they also have their reputation at stake. Push a seller towards a bad offer to make a sale and it might work or it might anger the seller, who stops seeing the realtor as "on their side". This is of particular value in the insular world of people who own multi-million dollar homes.
In the episode, one of the realtors is the listing agent for the $35 million home, a home he helped the owners purchase a few years back. One of the other realtors wants to bring in one of her contacts to get a walk through. It turns out her contact is a young man who himself represents a range of clients. However, she's picking at the price even before her contact has seen it. And sure enough, her contact also comes in with the intention of picking away at the price by "neg-ing".
Neg-ing is where the intermediary comes in and looks for problems or reasons why the property isn't that great with an overall goal of lowering the price, usually because the intermediary gets paid by saving their client money. This is a bit of a judgement call because wealthy buyers do often have representatives that check certain details, but one of the classic neg-ing hallmarks is asking insanely detailed questions that have less to do with checking the quality of the building than they do with developing a list of all the supposedly important features the property doesn't have to use as part of your argument when you start negotiating on price.
In the episode the intermediary asks whether the headboard on the bed has charging jacks built into it, implying that newer headboards often do. Just try to imagine, if you will, a buyer looking for a home in the $30 million+ range, and try to estimate how the charging jacks in the headboard will factor in importance to their purchasing decision. It's all a trick anyway; if the headboard had had jacks he would have said something about how most wealthy home owners wouldn't want the fine woodwork of the headboard marred by cheap phone jacks.
The episode presents the listing agent realtor as being in the wrong because he's kind of pompous (because he's the worst) in his interactions with the other realtors contact. But I suspect his attitude stemmed from the fact that his instincts were telling him something was off when she started picking so aggressively at the price. In truth, I rather suspect that the realtor for the neg-ing guy likely only uses this contact for when she's not the listing agent or she believes the seller won't give her any repeat business (estate sale, etc.) because she's also the worst. She doesn't care if the other realtor damages his relationship with the homeowners, and neither, frankly, does the real estate agency, since they can just replace him if his contacts run dry. Just a little tip if you are ever selling your home; unless you have to sell quickly for some reason it's usually financially better for you to leave a home on the market a little longer than to accept a low-ball offer, even if your agent is pressuring you to accept the offer. Statistics show that realtors selling their own homes tend to leave them on the market a couple months longer and get something like an average of $10000 more (according to Steven Levitt, I believe).
Bottom line, you probably won't identify very well with the people on the show unless you happen to be someone in the privileged position of being able to purchase one of these homes. If that's the case then congratulations and if you've enjoyed this review I'd really love to use your vacation home during the off season if you're just leaving it to sit around empty. Otherwise prepare yourself for a lot of very privileged people who don't think they're privileged, even as they shop for multi-million dollar homes they will use for something like four weeks out of the year. The homes are gorgeous because of course they are, truly top notch real estate porn, but it's cheap enough to watch and dream.
Fair warning, this gets a little long and rambling, so just jump to the last paragraph for the tl;dr.
According to the show, 80% of the homes in these high end markets are basically vacation homes for one percenters, so the home owners tend to be of a type. Wealthy, of course, but also used to being catered to and pampered. Polite, but in that polite society 'I'm going to smile to your face and talk about you behind our back' kind of way. Basically your stereotypical entitled rich person.
The realtors on the other hand, they're....well, they're just the worst. Being entitled is the natural state of being for rich people, but the realtors aren't rich, just wannabe rich. But dealing closely with wealth and privilege can cause those who wish they were wealthy and privileged to act as though it's all but a done deal that they will be themselves soon enough. They've met rich people and realized that rich people are just plain old humans; they compare those people with themselves and figure 'hey, why not me; I'm just as good looking and smart' and so on. Before you know it someone who barely graduated from high school will happily lecture others on, say, investment strategy, with supreme confidence.
There are, however, some interesting moments in the show. Beyond just the house porn, that is. One thing that you get to observe is how high-value properties are sold. Beyond a certain price, the value of an extremely high-end home is open to a certain amount of interpretation. Traditional real estate uses "comps", or comparables, to set a value range for a property. Age of the building, acreage, square feet, construction quality and material, etc. But that generally works because you can find other properties with similar qualities and observe what they sold for. With luxury properties it's not as easy because there isn't an agreed upon list of features with known values. What's the value of being on the beach? How about an amazing view? Or a unique architectural design?
This comes up in an episode where a home is being listed for $35 million. As is common in these kind of markets, realtors at the firm will help close a coworkers listing by reaching out to their contacts to see if they know a potential buyer. If their contact buys the building, they have some agreed upon split of the commission between the listing agent and the buyer's agent. But it's a little more complicated than just closing a sale. A realtor acting as the seller's agent has a little pull in swaying the home owner towards a bid, but they also have their reputation at stake. Push a seller towards a bad offer to make a sale and it might work or it might anger the seller, who stops seeing the realtor as "on their side". This is of particular value in the insular world of people who own multi-million dollar homes.
In the episode, one of the realtors is the listing agent for the $35 million home, a home he helped the owners purchase a few years back. One of the other realtors wants to bring in one of her contacts to get a walk through. It turns out her contact is a young man who himself represents a range of clients. However, she's picking at the price even before her contact has seen it. And sure enough, her contact also comes in with the intention of picking away at the price by "neg-ing".
Neg-ing is where the intermediary comes in and looks for problems or reasons why the property isn't that great with an overall goal of lowering the price, usually because the intermediary gets paid by saving their client money. This is a bit of a judgement call because wealthy buyers do often have representatives that check certain details, but one of the classic neg-ing hallmarks is asking insanely detailed questions that have less to do with checking the quality of the building than they do with developing a list of all the supposedly important features the property doesn't have to use as part of your argument when you start negotiating on price.
In the episode the intermediary asks whether the headboard on the bed has charging jacks built into it, implying that newer headboards often do. Just try to imagine, if you will, a buyer looking for a home in the $30 million+ range, and try to estimate how the charging jacks in the headboard will factor in importance to their purchasing decision. It's all a trick anyway; if the headboard had had jacks he would have said something about how most wealthy home owners wouldn't want the fine woodwork of the headboard marred by cheap phone jacks.
The episode presents the listing agent realtor as being in the wrong because he's kind of pompous (because he's the worst) in his interactions with the other realtors contact. But I suspect his attitude stemmed from the fact that his instincts were telling him something was off when she started picking so aggressively at the price. In truth, I rather suspect that the realtor for the neg-ing guy likely only uses this contact for when she's not the listing agent or she believes the seller won't give her any repeat business (estate sale, etc.) because she's also the worst. She doesn't care if the other realtor damages his relationship with the homeowners, and neither, frankly, does the real estate agency, since they can just replace him if his contacts run dry. Just a little tip if you are ever selling your home; unless you have to sell quickly for some reason it's usually financially better for you to leave a home on the market a little longer than to accept a low-ball offer, even if your agent is pressuring you to accept the offer. Statistics show that realtors selling their own homes tend to leave them on the market a couple months longer and get something like an average of $10000 more (according to Steven Levitt, I believe).
Bottom line, you probably won't identify very well with the people on the show unless you happen to be someone in the privileged position of being able to purchase one of these homes. If that's the case then congratulations and if you've enjoyed this review I'd really love to use your vacation home during the off season if you're just leaving it to sit around empty. Otherwise prepare yourself for a lot of very privileged people who don't think they're privileged, even as they shop for multi-million dollar homes they will use for something like four weeks out of the year. The homes are gorgeous because of course they are, truly top notch real estate porn, but it's cheap enough to watch and dream.