Home buyers have a new reason to be wary in this weakening housing market: Real-estate agents increasingly have lucrative incentives to push one home over another.This sales phenomena is not unique to real estate. Many industries offer a variety of volume salesperson bonuses. Lucy Maher has more.Slow sales have prompted builders and some individual sellers to offer unusually generous incentives to agents whose clients buy a home. Sellers normally pay the buyer's agent 2% to 3% of the home's price. Now many are offering thousands of dollars or other rewards, such as travel vouchers, on top of the normal commission.
Such incentives have long been used to sell some homes. But they have proliferated and become more generous recently as a glut of properties on the market makes it harder to sell homes. "These guys are desperate," Ivy Zelman, a Cleveland-based housing analyst at Credit Suisse Group, says of home builders.
