Exactly 2 days after the NAR Settlement officially took effect in Nashville, my team got the old bait and switch.
We’d been working with this couple (the wife is one of my best friends) for a while, and they’d made an offer on a house that had been languishing on the market for MONTHS. The seller was happily offering 3% commission throughout the entire negotiation, but we were never able to agree on the price, so my buyers walked away.
Right after 8/17, the seller’s agent came back to us and said, “if you can get your buyers back to the table, we will accept $X!”
We went back to our thrilled buyers, they agreed and we wrote the offer at the price we discussed. Guess what we got back? A counteroffer negotiating only 1 term…. you guessed it! They knocked our commission down to 2%.
We were backed into a corner. I either had to tell my bf that she and her husband had to pay the difference or we had to suck it up and take less than our buyer rep said.
I’m ashamed to say that we settled for less than we deserved because the alternative felt too awkward. Why? Because we hadn’t already set a clear expectation with our buyers that this could be the reality and they’d need to make up the difference. Something else became very clear…if we aren’t willing to do this, we won’t be paid what we are worth, we will only be paid what the seller is willing to agree to.
Which if you think about it, isn’t fair at all. Not just to you, but to your clients. Imagine if I accepted 2% on this best friends purchase, how would my other best friend feel if I made 3% on hers? What if my client decided to back out of this house, would she expect me to only take 2% on the next one even if the seller was willing to pay 3%? There are a ton of ‘what if’ scenarios which all boil down to point…commission integrity.
Just like it could be perceived as discrimination for us to arbitrarily charge one seller one fee, and another seller another- the same could be said for buyer agency. Instead, we all need a clear scope of service and a solid value proposition so that buyers looking for professional agents understand and are willing to pay for the service they receive.
Think there aren’t clients out there willing to pay top dollar for excellent service? Think again. Here’s what one of my very own clients had to say about actually wanting to pay my commission because I earned it!
“For the first time ever, buying or purchasing a home, I wanted her to receive the full commission, because I felt like she earned it, and that’s a really big deal in this market, in this industry, with everything changing, I was like you earned every dollar of that, what you did, what you came up with, how you showed up for me, how you showed up for my family, the extra hours that you put in that were unnecessary went beyond my expectations. And every cent of that, not only did I feel good about it, I wanted her to earn that.” – AJ Vaden
And I can teach you how to be the agent whose clients feel this way too when you join me in The Elevated Agent Collective!
