OUR PROGRAM DELIVERS MORE THAN WHAT ONE RECEIVES FROM HIGH COMMISSION BROKERS.

In the world of real estate today, there's a lot of confusion about what you get for the money you pay in commission. So many things have changed that even Realtors find it hard to explain what differentiates them from anyone else.

And then there's confusion over what really matters in the sale of a home! Do the big firms have an advantage? What matters more - the agent or the firm? What services truly impact a sale? What's fluff in the Realtor sales pitch?

If you analyze the way buyers go about finding and writing an offer on a property in this internet connected era, you will come away with the following important items. Buyers care about how your home is priced for its location, features and condition. An agent and the respective company should assist the seller to optimize the way the property presents itself to the market, pricing it correctly, maximizing exposure and use his or her experience during negotiations once a buyer(s) wants to buy. In other words a seller should be employing a Realtor that has considerable expertise, offers to cover all bases to expose the home and have strong negotiation skills and attention to detail. To that end, one will be hard pressed to come up with a better package than what Homeowners Concept offers. The savings in commissions is really a bonus.

It's all in the data

You see the average agent at Homeowners Concept sells 3 to 4 times more homes per year than the high commission agent and has been in real estate for 17 years vs only 4.5. Add to this the extensive marketing we provide via our unique magazine and high trafficked website. The differences are SUBSTANTIAL and our services stand above of the higher priced solutions! High commission agents persuade sellers to pay unnecessary commissions when in fact, on average, they deliver less than us.

UPFRONT FEE BROKERS ARE DISAPPEARING AS SELLERS WISE UP.

In just a few years we have witnessed the birth, explosion and demise of the flat fee/pay upfront/limited service brokers. Limited service is just that. They put your home in MLS for hundreds of dollars upfront but you're still selling the property on your own. If another agent brings the buyer you must pay the other agent in addition to having someone else like an attorney or another agent represent your side. The sellers that sold homes this way paid, on average, about 3.6% when all said and done. What became evident over time though, was that very few sellers could sell this way (only 1 in 4 sellers were successful in the last 3 years) for various reasons that I have explained in past blog posts.

As more and more of these homes listed with limited service would go unsold, home sellers started to wise up. Why pay hundreds of dollars UPFRONT when you have such a low, low probability of selling via this method? Unfortunately a lot of sellers found out the hard way that the flat fee model does not work after wasting months and years on the market without success. We estimate that sellers have spent well over $1.1 million dollars in upfront fees in Metro Milwaukee, without selling their home this way.

As a result, a number of these outfits have closed doors and the rest have considerably less home sellers willing to part with hundreds of dollars Upfront. One of the top 2 outfits completely converted to a full service model. The other offers full service in addition to limited but suggests right on their website that limited service decreases the marketability of the home!

So, it appears that the explosion in limited service way of selling a home was merely a fad just like we saw with the advent of the internet and the For Sale By Owner websites. It proves once again that selling a property requires proper marketing and a skilled agent to make it happen (most of the time). Homeowners Concept continues to offer that rare program whereby a seller gets to work with any of our highly experienced Realtors while paying thousands less in commission.