It has been pretty hard not to post on this thread… Looks like I lost the battle to temptation. That hard part is how to post without sounding like a shill of which I will surely be accused of….
In short I think that with the price of homes today, one can provide a high level of service to consumers and charge a lower commission. I don’t think it matters if it is on the listing side, or the buyers side. I believe that one of the largest misconceptions of consumers has to do with the amount of money a realtor makes. The reality is that the commissions are split up many ways and only a smaller percentage of top producing realtors make the big money. The bigger the corporate entity the less money realtors get.
At any rate I run the business as a second business yet I do not believe I provide any lesser service to my clients. I feel that I give them as good if not better representation then they would get from anyone else in the industry. I don’t claim to be a 20 year veteran or anything like that. I am simply an electrical engineer who had some rental properties and got tired of paying my Coldwell Banker agent (who is also my sister in law) full commission whenever I bought or sold a rental property.
The stories of both I Pay One and Help U Sell are interesting case studies. I owned a Help U Sell and quickly sold it because I saw MAJOR problems with the corporate structure. To say that it was poor is an understatement. I Pay One was never constructed for real estate. The main driver behind that entity was to get the loan business. The amount of money that they spent on advertising was staggering. They poured a ton of coin into the 1090 Padre broadcasts, you would hear several commercials every game. To purchase the naming rights of the Sports Arena was one of the stupidest things they could have done.
I often wonder how things would be if I did this 100% of the time. I am sure I would boost my revenue but probably not to the same level of what I make through engineering and having the real estate brokerage as a second business. I do agree that at some point, quality of service falls off due to having to many clients. Yet I have yet to field complaints about my level of service. I believe if I can provide this service, then anyone else that is motivated and intelligent can as well. I am somewhat familiar with the Assist to Sell . It is very similar to Help U Sell but Assist to Sell has not saturated the county like Help U Sell did. I guess we will see what happens with them.
