Flat Fee is out. Reasons why:

Recently Homeowners Concept switched from being a flat fee company to just charging 1.5% of sales price. Our fee was around 1.5% anyhow as it was a tiered fee structure, so there is very little impact on any of our clients. The reason behind the switch though, was the fact that we needed to disassociate ourselves from the other flat fee companies which have popped up in the last few years and are now showing histories of low success rates while charging the sellers a hefty upfront fee of around $500 (see post of 2/20/09). Most of these outfits are doing just MLS data entry, and they could care less whether the home sells. Thousands of sellers have fallen victim to paying the hundreds of dollars upfront, wasting months or years on the market and having to turn to another broker (ourselves included) to eventually sell.

Homeowners Concept on the other hand is a full service real estate company which offers more marketing, more experience for less commission due to innovative and efficient systems and has been around since 1984. We have also earned the Accredited Business BBB award - one of only two large companies to have this! We have a vested interest in making sure the home gets maximum exposure (percentage wise we spend the most amount of money advertising properties of any company). We actually work very hard for the money.

So many of these flat fee outfits have come to the market the last few years (as of this writing we can find at least 11 in SE-WI) because it is such easy money for little work with no pressure to sell the homes. The proliferation of these is reminiscent of the online FSBO websites that were started as internet became mainstream. Hundreds of them have shut down in recent years as consumers wised up that spending hundreds of dollars upfront to be on "somebody's" website that received virtually no hits, was indeed useless. We feel the same fate awaits the MLS only/limited service companies.