Why flat fees just make sense
The real estate industry has many long standing traditions which are being tested in today’s market. Fees as a percentage of sales price were once a given in every real estate transaction– that’s a fancy way of saying that the price of your house dictates how much we make for selling it. But this tradition is being challenged as never before.
The Internet has empowered consumers with an abundance of information, making them better able to negotiate and ask the right questions before hiring any service professional.
Experience Matters
Yes, it does. But I’m talking about the home-selling experience of the consumer. Once you sell a home or two of your own, it becomes obvious that the real estate sales professionals you hired are all basically doing the same thing. And that’s the point I’m trying to make: Why should the price of your home dictate how much you spend to hire someone to sell it if that person is basically doing the same things to sell an $800,000 house and a $400,000 house? Our answer is that it shouldn’t. This is why flat fee listing makes so much sense.
What we do on each home we list
- MLS and Internet marketing: you’ll be on the local MLS, Zillow, Trulia, and craigslist
- Yard sign
- Lock box
- Professional Showing Service (verifies and schedules showings for brokers who want to bring clients to see your home)
- Virtual Tour (5 video shots and 6 professional still shots of every home)
- 100 Professional Glossy Fliers: we don’t make them, an actual professional does, but we pay for them.
- Legal help:
- we take care of all the paperwork, contracts, negotiations, and closing
- CMA: we’ll look at all the sold homes and current listed homes in your area to help you determine the best sales price of your house.
We’re not a traditional real estate company
Absolutely not. We know that our service is not for everyone. We ask our clients to do a couple of things to help us keep our costs down. Things like:
- Hold your own open houses: we feel that you are the best person to hold the open house because your motivation is to sell your house, and you know the most about it. We’ll advertise the open house for you and will provide you with open house signs.
- Refill the flier box when it gets low.
- Communicate with us via email, phone, fax, and our website. If you’re the kind of person who wants lots of face-time with your agent then we may not be the company for you. Our primary means of communication with all of our clients is through our incredible website, telephone, email, and faxing for documents. We actually require that all of our clients have access to a fax machine, and email in order to work with us. There’s lots of Kinkos locations in our service area if you don’t own a fax machine, and many of our clients receive faxes this way.
We think it makes sense to charge clients the same price for the same service. It doesn’t matter to us what your house price is. We’ll offer you the same outstanding service for the same price every time. There’s no sliding scale, no hidden fees, no caveats. Just one low price for an effective marketing package every time.
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