A realtor isn’t needed but I think a lawyer isn’t a bad idea. You don’t want to mess up a 7 figure transaction…

Yeah, paying a lawyer and their associated paralegals for 2-4 hours of work is easily worth the low four figure rate.

7 figures?! Uh… not many houses around here go for seven figures.

not many houses around here don't

Seven figures means a million dollars or more.

A large fraction of us on Hacker News are in the California Bay Area / Silicon Valley, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Toronto, London, and other major cities where a million dollars gets you a small home, far from the city. In most of those cities, you need to pay well over a million to get an average-sized single family home.

A very standardized, regulated transaction. The title company and the banks do these all day every day. Unless there is something unusual about your situation, all a lawyer is going to do is cost you money.

This is a regional thing. In many west coast states, escrow companies are the norm and nobody hires a lawyer. In many east coast states, both sides hire a real estate lawyer (and you'd be crazy not to).

Most people who've only lived in one region don't realize that the other half of the country does real estate transactions completely differently.

In Washington State escrow agents actually are attorneys -- but their practice is limited to one very specific area of law: real estate purchase contracts.

https://www.wsba.org/for-legal-professionals/join-the-legal-...

Because their practice area is so limited they don't have to go to law school, and their "bar" exam is much easier.

The flip side of this is that unlimited practice attorneys (i.e. "real lawyers") are automatically allowed to do everything that real estate agents and escrow agents are allowed to do.

How did you market it and do you think listing on mls, having an agent show the house, or paying a buyers broker fee would have gotten you more and higher offers?

6% higher?

We didn’t market it. My found our current house through a friend. The wife of the couple that owned the house and my wife hit it off. They sold the house to use at well below market rate (in fact, afterwards we got a letter from the county tax office basically asking “uh… you bought this house well below the market rate… how did that happen?”). We figured out how much we needed to sell our old house for everything to work out. We told friends that we were looking for a buyer for our house and someone had a coworker that was interested. They came and looked at it and bought it for what we wanted. Everyone was happy at the end of the day.

That’s a great story! Do you know why your friend was willing to sell below market? Was it just 6% below market - what they would have spent on fees anyway?

Well, they built the house (the husband was a contractor). It’s an integrated concrete form (ICF) house. They raised their family in the house and had lived in it long enough that it was all paid off. They didn’t want it to go to just anyone, so they asked us how much we wanted to pay and we came to an agreement on a number. They wanted to build a smaller retirement house and were just looking for enough to build that house (as in, they planned on building it themselves).

I put mine on Zillow after interviewing a realtor and it sold for $1,000 less than the maximum amount he realtor said I could expect. Since I didn't have to pay his commission I came out ahead by a lot.

> We both sold our last house and purchased our current house with anyone using a realtor at any point.

I think if you're buying a house for the first time, trying to wing it is probably not the best idea.