No! Money, Down!
A common refrain we get from real estate agents is that for all the work they might put in they might not see any reward if their client does not end up buying. That means they might go to tens of viewings and submit multiple offers without being paid. Ignore for a moment that the idea of a person showing up with a buyer to view a home is itself a contrived task. After all, if the intent is to make sure people are not stealing from your home it should be the seller or their agent’s job. That is precisely the case in other countries. Ignore that a buyer’s agent showing a home to their client does not make any sense; they know as much about the home they never set foot in as the buyer. They do not have the technical background to understand physical defects, making them a glorified door opener. Often enough there is just a lockbox with a code anyway.
The core problem is that their clients expect them to work on contingency. Some lawyers also work on contingency, and on average it is less expensive to pay up front. The reason is that if you expect someone to take a risk to be paid, then they must be compensated for that risk. Clients then are also not as efficient with their use of the service, as they believe it is a sunk cost. Even if salespeople were somehow qualified for the task, the existing system does not give clients choice. At ZVR we sometimes have clients ask why they should have to pay for per-use fees such as the offer generator, viewing time and lawyer time if they do not end up getting an accepted offer. The answer is that to keep costs to a minimum we can only do so by also shifting the risk from us back to where it belongs: the buyer.
Buyers are often deceived into thinking that they will not be paying a commission, but clearly the commission is baked into the sale price. For this reason they do not properly negotiate for the price of the services they are getting. With ZVR we allow clients to un-bake this commission from the price by rebating it back to them, and hopefully creating a fairer system for home purchase.
