Did You Purchase or Receive a Realtor Gift?

It has always been a joke between my wife and I because when I purchased my first home (now our rental), and she purchased her condo (sold before we wed) prior to us meeting, we did not receive gifts from our Realtors. I remember distinctly hearing from all our friends that “Our Realtor bought us a _______,” and thinking, wow, I did not receive anything. Well other than my yearly envelope of business cards and a magnet for my fridge. Then I met my wife, and the same thing happened to her. To this day, it seems like we are the only ones who did not receive a house warming gift from our Realtor.

So when we closed on our new house this week, we waited in anticipation of whether or not we would receive a house warming gift from our Realtor. It was not that we needed to receive anything from our Realtor; however, after hearing that all of our friends and family had, we were hoping something might change in our favor. The house has now been ours for a couple of days and still nothing.

As we were driving back this weekend from our trip to Detroit, my wife decided to search on the internet whether it was typical for Realtors to buy their clients housewarming gifts, and we wondered what was the typical amount spent.

As my wife searched, we were both shocked that rather than find on the internet an abundance of gifts received FROM the Realtor, she found it was typical that people bought gifts FOR their Realtor. Really? I was appalled, and here is my thinking!

A Realtor makes a heck of a commission on the sale of a home. In our instance, listing agent and selling agent were with the same company, but separate agents. The selling agent pulled in $5,973.39 and the buying agent $3,982.26. I realize these numbers do not mean the agent made that entire amount as the company itself probably took a decent amount of that income. However, they still made a decent income off the sale.

Also, on our deal, we walked into the home un-represented. Therefore, the Realtor automatically was our selling agent, and scored big as I am sure most people come with a Realtor. We really enjoyed working with our Realtor, and in our own experiment were hoping it would mean we might get a housewarming gift.

There is always debate about whether the Seller or the Buyer really pays the agent commissions. Most will say the seller pays the commissions; however, the price of the home would have been cheaper without Realtors, and I can reasonably argue their commission was included in my purchase price.

So with all that in mind, why would I need to buy my Realtor a gift when they just got paid a hefty commission to represent me on the home? As much as we really liked our Realtor, and he was helpful and always available, we just paid him, and in our opinion, there is no need to buy him a gift above and beyond what he already received.

So in the end, I think my wife and I are cursed when it comes to housewarming present from the Realtor. I know this whole post might sound tacky and like we want a present. That is not my intention. We just found it ironic that everyone we know always gets something, so shouldn’t we?

I am really interested to hear people’s opinions on gift giving/receiving when it comes to Realtors and the purchasing of your home. What do you think?

When it comes to selling your home and gift giving, that is an entirely separate discussion in my opinion because a selling agent may actually have to put in a considerable amount of work to get a home sold. On the buying end, the effort put forth by a Realtor is a lot smaller for still a pretty big chunk of the pie.