What are quantifiers?
A quantifier is a word or
phrase which is used before a noun to indicate the amount or quantity:
'Some', 'many',
'a lot of' and 'a few' are
examples of quantifiers.
Quantifiers can be used with
both countable and uncountable nouns.
Examples:
§ There are some drinks in the fridge.
§ He's got only a few euros.
§ How much furniture is there in your living room?
§ There is a large quantity of food in this kitchen.
§ He's got more time than we thought.
Examples of quantifiers
Ø
With Uncountable Nouns
§ much
§ a
little/little/very little *
§ a bit
(of)
§ a
great deal of
§ a
large amount of
§ a large quantity of
Ø
With Both
§ all
§ enough
§ more/most
§ less/least
§ no/none
§ not
any
§ some
§ any
§ a lot
of
§ lots
of
§ plenty of
Ø
With Countable Nouns
§ many
§ a
few/few/very few **
§ a
number (of)
§ several
§ a
large number of
§ a
great number of
§ a
majority of
* NOTE
Ø Little or very
little mean that there is not enough of
something.
Ø a little means
that there is not a lot of something, but there is enough.
**
NOTE
Ø few, very few mean
that there is not enough of something.
Ø a few means
that there is not a lot of something, but there is enough.
Un cuantificador es una palabra o frase que se usa antes de un sustantivo para indicar la cantidad:
'Some', 'many', 'a lot of' y 'a few' son ejemplos de cuantificadores.
Los cuantificadores se pueden usar con sustantivos contables e incontables.
Ejemplos:
§ There are some drinks in the fridge.
§ He's got only a few euros.
§ How much furniture is there in your living room?
§ There is a large quantity of food in this kitchen.
§ He's got more time than we thought.
Ø Con sustantivos incontables
§ much
§ a little/little/very little*
§ a bit (of)
§ a great deal of
§ a large amount of
§ a large quantity of
Ø Con ambos
§ all
§ enough
§ more/most
§ less/least
§ no/none
§ not any
§ some
§ any
§ a lot of
§ lots of
§ plenty of
Ø Con sustantivos contables
§ many
§ a few/few/very few**
§ a number (of)
§ several
§ a large number of
§ a great number of
§ a majority of
* NOTA
Ø
Little or very little significa que no hay suficiente de algo.
Ø a little significa que no hay mucho de algo, pero hay suficiente.
** NOTA
Ø
few, very few significa que no hay suficiente de algo.
Ø a few pocos significa que no hay mucho de algo, pero hay suficiente.
Um quantificador é uma palavra ou frase que é usada antes de um substantivo para indicar a quantidade:
'Some', 'many', 'a lot of' and 'a few' são exemplos de quantificadores.
Os quantificadores podem ser usados com substantivos contáveis e incontáveis.
Exemplos:
§ There are some drinks in the fridge.
§ He's got only a few euros.
§ How much furniture is there in your living room?
§ There is a large quantity of food in this kitchen.
§ He's got more time than we thought.
Exemplos de quantificadores
Ø Com
substantivos incontáveis
§ much
§ a
little/little/very little*
§ a bit
(of)
§ a
great deal of
§ a
large amount of
§ a large quantity of
Ø Com
ambos
§ all
§ enough
§ more/most
§ less/least
§ no/none
§ not
any
§ some
§ any
§ a lot
of
§ lots
of
§ plenty of
Ø Com substantivos contáveis
§ many
§ a
few/few/very few**
§ a
number (of)
§ several
§ a
large number of
§ a
great number of
§ a majority of
* NOTA
Ø Little or very
little significa
que não há o suficiente de alguma coisa.
Ø a little significa que não há muita coisa, mas há o suficiente.
** NOTA
Ø few, very few significam que não há o
suficiente de alguma coisa.
Ø a few significa que não há muita coisa, mas há o
suficiente.
A. Answer the question below.
1. What’s a Real Estate Agent Worth?
2. Is being a real estate agent worth it?3. How much money do most real estate agents make?
4. What is the highest paying job in real estate?
5. Can you get rich being a real estate agent?
6. Is real estate a stressful job?
7. Who's the richest real estate agent?
8. Why do real estate agents make so much money?
9. How much do Million Dollar Listing agents make?
B. Read the article below and fill in the gaps with the right quantifier from the box:
|
More / most / little / no / many / much / a
lot / less / sorts of numbers / little more / some / any / a lot more |
The ink on her Yale diploma was
barely dry when Panle Jia Barwick drove from New Haven, Connecticut, to Boston
to look at houses. A newly minted economics Ph.D., she was starting an
assistant professorship at MIT and needed to secure a place to live — fast. A
colleague introduced her to a real estate agent, and in a single day she toured
a handful of properties with him.
Soon after, she made an offer,
ultimately paying $430,000 for the house. It was _____ than she
wanted to spend, but for the _____ part Barwick didn’t lie awake
wondering if she got a raw deal. Instead, the question that dogged her was
this: Why didn’t her real estate agent ask for a penny?
"As economists, we believe
there is no free lunch,” she says, reflecting on the experience 16 years later.
Barwick is now a professor at Cornell University and has published numerous
academic papers on the real estate industry.
“Obviously, I learned that the
commission is not free.”
That’s an understatement. Consumers pay an estimated $100 billion in real estate agent commissions each year. The agents involved in a median-priced sale today split approximately $18,000 in commission fees. But _____ first-time buyers have _____ clue how the people who showed them houses, crafted their offers, and advised on their closings actually make money.
This knowledge gap makes
negotiating fees difficult for sellers and nearly impossible for buyers.
For her own purchase, Barwick
eventually calculated that her agent and the brokerage he worked for earned _____ than $500
an hour, or about twice what the typical Massachusetts law firm charges today.
While she thought her agent did a good job, the fee seemed excessive for the amount of work he did. It felt like her relatively easy purchase had subsidized customers who took up _____ _____ _____ time and resources.
Agents justify these _____ _____ _____ by noting that they only get paid if they make a deal happen and often take on significant out-of-pocket costs. In today’s competitive market, they point out, _____ buyers need to bid on multiple homes before getting one, making one-weekend sales rare.
Barwick and others who study the industry believe the lure of big paydays for agents — along with aggressive industry tactics to keep commissions high and hard to understand — distorts home prices and stifles competition. This, they say, hurts everyone who participates in the housing market, from buyers and sellers to real estate agents themselves. Even the United States government seems to agree.
So — these days, what’s a real estate agent really worth?
Whose money is it?
The real estate commission
structure in the U.S. can be traced back to 1913, when the National Association
of Real Estate Exchanges (a precursor to NAR, a trade group that now represents
1.56 million Realtors) agreed on its first code of ethics.
“A real
estate man,” the code declared, “should always be ready and willing to divide
the regular commission equally with _____ member of
the board who can produce a buyer for _____ of his
clients.”
Back in
1913, forcing agents to cooperate probably made sense. Before that code
established _____ guardrails, there were _____ real
standards for selling property. In the past, land was often passed from one
generation to the next or informally traded among neighbors. But that was
beginning to change as telephones, cars and commuter trains became _____ mainstream.
Commission-sharing encouraged agents to bring their buyers to rival listings,
giving consumers _____ _____ _____ options.
Today,
65% of real estate agents are women, according to NAR, and anyone with an
internet connection can browse listings — but the century-old rule to divide
commissions _____ or _____ still
applies.
When a
seller hires an agent to market a home, they agree to pay a percentage of the
eventual sale price in commissions. The total rate is generally between 5% and
6%, depending on local norms.
That
payment is split roughly 50/50 between the listing agent and the buyer’s agent.
It is then further split between each agent and the brokerage they work for.
(Agent-broker splits vary widely, ranging from 40/60 for a brand new agent up
to 80/20 or better for top performers.) The result is that in _____ cases the
seller pays both agents, and the buyer rarely writes a check directly to _____ agent.
Industry
insiders say this setup remains pro-consumer.
“We have this chicken or egg question. If a buyer buys a house for $250,000, whose money is it?” asks Ron Phipps, a Realtor from Rhode Island who served as NAR’s president in 2011. “Until it goes to the closing table it is the buyer's money — but then it becomes the seller’s money. In the allocation of the sale, to have the brokerage fee paid from that $250,000 purchase fee creates efficiency of the market.”
Economists, on the other hand,
argue that buyers ultimately pay through higher home prices and a lack of
quality control.
“Usually,
higher quality services deserve a higher payment — you pay for what you get,”
says Barwick. “Not here. The payment is determined before you even meet with
your potential buyer's agent. So, the payment does not reflect experience. It
does not reflect quality of service or the cost of providing the service.”
The primary change has been in speed, not price
For _____ of the
last century, the primary job of a buyer’s agent was to search for properties.
The ways they did this, of course, evolved over time.
In the
1980s, agents would wait around for a truck that would deliver a book of
listings every week. "It was like Christmas,” says Bill Gassett, an early
real estate blogger and an agent at RE/MAX outside of Boston.
“You didn’t know what had come on the market without the book.”
By the
mid-1990s, agents with NAR membership got access to digital Multiple Listing
Service (MLS) databases showing information on homes for sale in their area.
This is the era I remember from my childhood. Before embarking on a day of
showings, my real estate agent mom would print out pages from the MLS filled
with houses she had picked out to show whatever buyer she was carting around
that day.
The MLS
sites still exist, and _____ agents still bring printouts to
showings. But the role of the MLS started to change in the early 2000s when
Zillow began publishing the information publicly for the first time.
Voyeurs
were immediately drawn to the site (which crashed on launch day), but it took _____ time
before _____ people
made Zillow or other listing sites a key part of their home search process —
and even longer before real estate professionals accepted the change.
Today,
95% of buyers search for homes online, according to NAR. _____ of the
search and discovery process is now handled by consumers themselves.
Buyers often contact agents with
specific houses in mind. "When I first started out, so _____ of the
role of working with buyers was related to helping them with the search. In _____ cities
and towns, you weren’t allowed to have signs, so literally having the MLS book
was the key to access to the property,” says Phipps, who joined his mother’s
real estate business in 1980.
“I _____ longer
need to do the search; what I need to do is help the consumer figure out what
the variables are in the search and determine what information is important,”
he says, noting that practically every other step in the home sale process,
from staging to financing, has gotten _____ complicated
and needs _____ agent
involvement than before.
Perhaps
that is why the internet has not been the fatal blow to real estate agents that
it was to travel agents or Tower Records. According to NAR, 87% of
homebuyers and 90% of home sellers still hire agents. The share of homebuyers
using agents is actually up from 69% in 2001.
In fact, _____ agents
have thrived by being extremely online, building their businesses first as
bloggers, then as Instagram and now TikTok influencers. For _____ others,
however, technology has been part blessing and part curse.
It’s
common to see social media posts describing real estate agents as “professional
scammers” or real estate commissions as “highway robbery.”
Agents say they are constantly
fighting the perception that they get paid handsomely to do _____ _____ than
unlock doors.
At the
same time, posts from _____ agents hyping high pay and
flexible hours surely encouraged _____ of the 156,000 people who got
their real estate licenses in 2020 and 2021 — 60% _____ than in
the two years prior. (A low barrier to entry and the pandemic trend toward
career changes helped, too.)
As of March 2022, there were about
twice as _____ real
estate agents as homes for sale. This means experienced agents are competing
with newcomers for a severely limited number of listings.
For _____, however, the biggest change has
been speed. Customers oftentimes choose to work with whoever responds first,
says Phipps, turning real estate into a 24/7 gig.
“The primary change has been in
speed, not price,” agrees Glenn Kelman, CEO of brokerage Redfin.
“We talk about how crazy the market is and how fast homes are selling as if that is purely a cyclical phenomenon, an indication of how low inventory is,” he says. “But I would say part of it is a secular change. Inventory turns over _____ faster because people have iPhones.”
‘The price cartel is eroding’
Kelman has long been one of the
industry’s _____ vocal
critics despite running one of the country's best-known brokerages. In a 2007
interview with 60 Minutes, he declared, "Real estate,
by far, is the _____ screwed-up industry in
America."
Early on,
Redfin thought it “could automate the agent completely out of existence,”
reflects Kelman. “But I’ve been here for 17 years, and for 16 of those years
we’ve acknowledged people are going to want to call someone.” Buyers want
guidance on how _____ to offer; sellers want help
deciding what improvements to make before listing.
Today,
Redfin employs 3,000 agents. Its agents charge a total commission of about 4% (a
1.3% listing fee on average plus the standard 2.5-to-3% buyer agent commission)
and give buyers a rebate worth around $2,200 after closing.
Startups
are following this example. For instance, Clever Real Estate matches sellers
with agents from traditional firms who are willing to accept a 1% listing fee
and offers buyers rebates worth 0.5% of the sale. Yoreevo, a brokerage in
New York City, gives up to a 2% rebate to buyers.
While these tech-driven discount brokerages are helping _____ consumers save — and, by _____ accounts, are putting price pressure on other firms — their market share remains relatively small.
“The price cartel is eroding
around the edges,” says Stephen Brobeck, who has studied the real estate
industry since the 1980s, currently as a senior fellow at the Consumer
Federation of America. But he says for substantive change to agent pay to
happen, something external will need to force it.
Enter the
Department of Justice.
In
November 2020, the Trump DOJ announced an antitrust lawsuit against
NAR. As part of a settlement agreement announced the same day, NAR agreed to
allow listing sites to publish offered commissions and to prohibit buyer
brokers from describing their services as free.
The
government has had its eye on real estate commissions for decades. Usually, NAR
(which has spent $715 million on lobbying since 1998, making
it among the largest lobbying groups in the country) agrees to _____ nice-sounding
but relatively small fixes, and the government allows things to carry on
largely as before.
At first,
it looked like the latest dust-up would be _____ of the
same. Then, in July 2021, the Justice Department abruptly withdrew the
settlement. Now under the Biden administration, the department said the
agreement would “not adequately protect the department’s rights to investigate
other conduct by NAR.”
NAR is
waiting for a ruling on its petition arguing DOJ's withdrawal was not legal.
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment, and it’s not entirely clear
what comes next. However, based on Biden’s broader antitrust agenda,
observers believe the DOJ could go for the nuclear option of untying buyer and
seller commissions. In other words, buyers and sellers would each pay their
agents directly.
The
thinking is that untying, or decoupling, commissions would allow for _____ negotiation
on both sides of a deal, leading to _____ price
competition and a better alignment of skill, time and pay.
NAR is
vehemently opposed to this outcome. The organization is circulating an
infographic that declares, “The current way brokerage services are paid
prevents a greater cost burden that would be especially devastating for
first-time and low-income homebuyers.”
And: “If
buyers had to pay real estate broker commissions directly, it would add
thousands of dollars to an already costly transaction.”
NAR is
not entirely wrong. Surveys consistently show that the biggest hurdle to buying
a home is coming up with the down payment and closing costs.
Lenders would likely need to allow
borrowers to roll commissions into their mortgages like they sometimes do for
closing costs, but that may require regulatory changes.
_____, including NAR, also believe needing to pay directly would lead to fewer buyers hiring agents. This might be fine when everything goes smoothly but might not be so appealing in a fiercely competitive market like we’re in right now. It would, of course, also hurt the economics of the industry.
“Every day I go out, I am
unemployed,” says Phipps. “So, I have to engage buyers and sellers each day to
say, 'Here is the range of skills, experience, and opportunities I bring to
you. Do you value them?'”
Source: https://money.com/whats-a-real-estate-agent-worth/
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