> Great, so you are wealthy and have wealthy friends and family.
Relative to HN, probably not; globally, definitely, for California...that’s sort of a fuzzy matter of perspective (probably not for a California homeowner), but, eh, whatever. Not the point. My point is that satisfaction is not completely irrelevant for agents.
> That still doesn’t mean agents are not trying to get prices up.
Maybe, though even if they aren't hoping for repeat or referral business the incentives are more for agents to close deals as rapidly as possible; most buyers are going to be looking near the limit of what they can afford anyway, a buyer's agent trying to push them higher is just going to make the process slower. A seller's agent wanting to maximize price would actually be acting in their principal’s interest, but even on the seller side the incentive is to get a deal and close rather than drag things out for a little bump; spending twice the work for a an extra 10% on thr sale price (and thus commission) isn’t a winning move even though it may be what the seller would want.
> Also, given rising housing prices and the state of overall student debt/rising costs of education, I would bet that the average number of houses someone buys/owns in a lifetime is going to drastically go down in the next few decades
The sources I’ve seen have shown it going up recently (increasing economic inequality and buy/rent price ratio should probably have that effect by cutting some of the people that would buy the fewest houses entirely out of homeownership.)
Relative to HN, probably not; globally, definitely, for California...that’s sort of a fuzzy matter of perspective (probably not for a California homeowner), but, eh, whatever. Not the point. My point is that satisfaction is not completely irrelevant for agents.
> That still doesn’t mean agents are not trying to get prices up.
Maybe, though even if they aren't hoping for repeat or referral business the incentives are more for agents to close deals as rapidly as possible; most buyers are going to be looking near the limit of what they can afford anyway, a buyer's agent trying to push them higher is just going to make the process slower. A seller's agent wanting to maximize price would actually be acting in their principal’s interest, but even on the seller side the incentive is to get a deal and close rather than drag things out for a little bump; spending twice the work for a an extra 10% on thr sale price (and thus commission) isn’t a winning move even though it may be what the seller would want.
> Also, given rising housing prices and the state of overall student debt/rising costs of education, I would bet that the average number of houses someone buys/owns in a lifetime is going to drastically go down in the next few decades
The sources I’ve seen have shown it going up recently (increasing economic inequality and buy/rent price ratio should probably have that effect by cutting some of the people that would buy the fewest houses entirely out of homeownership.)