How you get paid inevitably shapes how you do your job.
One big example can be found in the financial services field. Too many people
wind up in the clutches of some some big firm or chain and end up steered into financial products that an adviser is getting paid a commission or fee to push.
If your pay is largely or solely tied to commissions, you are going to hustle like mad to sell, sell, sell.
Of course, my interest here is in homes – and the roiling discontent with the Realtor business model that is obvious to anyone who reads the comment board on this blog.
If we could wave our magic wand and shift agents across the country from commission to salary, client service would certainly go up. Beneficial or not, the number of Realtors would also drop dramatically.
Of course, like any service, you would have to pay for it.
The present day residential real estate business model to buy or sell a home is and has been broken for a very, very long time.
The business foundation it rests upon when it was built in the early 1900′s and then modified when retail giants such as SEARS and entered into the business in the 1970′s and 1980′s and then left, has reduced the trust the public has with agents to below a used car salesmen.
Having agents not paid a salary or benefits and making them in the eyes of the IRS being independent contractors is a horrible way to treat people – bringing into a real estate office anyone who can fog a mirror and not investing anything into their success (for instance, unlike the corporate world, there is no field sales training to help make a salesperson successful to both themselves and their customers).
The bottom line is that residential real estate is one of least trusted, most manipulated and dishonest of any industry.
The sad thing is that the cost of buying and owning a home is so expensive and when a buyer makes a mistake, they then have to pay tens or more likely hundreds of thousands of dollars to extricate themselves, hoping they won’t go broke, get divorced and ruin their credit during the process.
Real estate sales is short term thinking with very long term consequences.
The Banks and the NAR call the shots and have politicians in their back pockets, so the consumer (and the agent) – as usual – is left holding the bag.
Make it a great day from your friends at Family Abstract, Inc.
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