The Homeowners Concept Advantage: Recent Case

We recently sold a home in Cudahy on Rosewood Dr that had been with Homeowners Concept for a number of months but had switched to a 6% broker after it expired with us. During the listing we had 3 offers from 3 different buyers but all where for a price that was unacceptable to the seller.

The first offer was the highest for about $205,000 but sellers felt that "they were not going to give it away". A couple of months later sellers reduced the advertised price and another offer came in for just under $200,000. Again sellers rejected it as inadequate. After a period of time a third offer came in even lower than the first two offers. Despite the writing on the wall of a declining market, the sellers refused to accept it. About this time the listing came up for expiration and to our amazement sellers wanted to try a conventional "high commission" broker.

After a few weeks with the new broker, sellers reduced their price to under $200,000 (and paying 6% on top of it now). The buyer with the 3rd offer was made aware of the reduction and was willing to redraft the offer now that the sellers had come to grips with pricing. The new offer was finally accepted and because buyer had been found during the time with Homeowners Concept, the commission to seller fell under our low fee (buyer was an exclusion to their new listing with the high commission broker and he was not entitled to any commission). Sellers were very lucky that the buyer had not found a property and as a result we were able to put the deal together and save them a big chunk of the 6% commission.

In summary, most sellers rely on our expertise (and we do have much more expertise than the average high commission agents) especially important in the real estate environment that we are in. Every so often though some sellers refuse to listen to facts and market data. And by paying much more commission makes absolutely no difference to a buyer as these sellers found out. Cases such as this have happened to us before (we have been saving sellers the huge commission for 25 years now and listed tens of thousands of homes). We even have had a few situations whereby Homeowners Concept brought the buyer to the table after the sellers had switched to a 6% broker. In those cases sellers paid 6% and Homeowners Concept was paid MORE than our low fee (we got paid the co-broke commission since we brought the buyer -2.4% on average-).