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Our fully licensed sales professionals are members of their local MLS® real estate board enabling them to properly market your property both on REALTOR.CA and their local MLS® system for maximum exposure to potential Buyers. Our real estate agents provide the same real estate services they would if they charged you a higher real estate commission, the only difference is they charge you less, way less. It's the best deal in town, why pay more to sell your home?

There has been a lot of recent talk about the Competition Bureau & the recent changes to the MLS® rules. Its time to shed a little light on this, at least from our perspective. The new MLS® rules allow for a REALTOR® to do what is referred to as “mere-posting” a listing onto the local MLS® real estate board. They will charge some sort of nominal fee for this, probably around $500 or something. The idea here is to allow people to market their properties themselves, (For Sale By Owner) and do all of the work themselves. From where we sit, this is probably a good thing. It gives consumers choices, which they previously did not really have. Now as we see it, consumers have 3 viable scenarios:

Scenario 1 – Sell it through One Percent Realty. We will charge you $9,950 for this same $500,000 home, with all the services and exposure that you would receive from the traditional higher commission companies. This fee also includes payment to the buyers agent (usually $4,500). We do open houses, handle the showings, negotiations, and paperwork that you would expect from any full service real estate company. In short, the services and exposure are the same as you would get from option #1 above, but for way less money.

Scenario 2 – Sell it yourself. You can now put your home with a local real estate board that operates an MLS® system and have your home exposed with all the other listings, and deal directly with the public or salespeople who may show your property. Worth noting, is that since your property is on the local board MLS® system you will have a reasonable chance of dealing with a buyer's agent. These buyers agents expect to be paid. Most likely, they will be looking to the Seller to pay them something, probably at least half of the fees discussed above (the $500,000 home). So again, if we use the $500,000 home as our example, a buyer's agent in British Columbia often will be expecting to receive approximately 3.255% on the 1st $100,000 plus 1.1625% on the balance of the sale price or $7,905 to sell your property plus an additional $500 or so for the FSBO company's upfront listing fee ~totalling $8405.

Scenario 3 – Sell it through the traditional “higher commission companies” who will place your property with a local real estate board that operates an MLS® system and provide full service real estate. Depending upon what your home is worth, this will cost a fair amount of money, though it will vary across the country. A $500,000 home can typically cost $17,000 (assuming a 7% commission on the 1st $100,000 and 2.5% on the balance) in British Columbia through a company like this, although commissions do vary in the marketplace.

So if you can have the full services of our professional salespeople for only $9,950, why would you not just leave it to a professional?

Why is that. We believe it is two reasons. Firstly, our listings (under $900,000) typically offer $3500 commission to Cooperating Brokers. While $3500 might not be as much as some of other listings, it still is a decent amount of money for a paycheque for Canadians these days including a lot of sales professionals. The more important reason why other agents cooperate and sell our listings is that it is the Buyers who are dictating the shots these days. As mentioned above, if the Buyer loves the home does the amount of commission matter to the Buyer?