Greed.

March 17th, 2009 Categories: Real Estate Chatter

I’m so tired of the greed. Everyone needs to make a living. But charging fees to a client that isn’t your own because your client is not paying it, is WRONG.

I have a buyer who’s been looking at foreclosures. Today we found one he’d like to make an offer on. When I saw who the listing agent is, I cringed. I’ve dealt with them before. They’re the kind that stipulate in the Broker’s Remarks : DO NOT CALL OUR OFFICE TO FIND OUT IF YOUR OFFER WAS RECEIVED. Gee, I thought that’s what offices, phones and staff were for; to provide customer service.

Anyway, that’s not my beef with them today. When I looked further in the remarks it states that the buyer “must pay a $325 compliance fee for maintaining records and files.” The only reason they are charging my buyer this is because their seller won’t pay it to them!

My buyer is already agreeing to pay my brokerage firm our administrative charge. Why should he get hit with a double whammy and have to pay the seller’s side of the listing office fee because the seller refuses to pay it?

By the way, we’ve been on the other side of this as well and we do NOT charge buyers of our REO listings our administrative fee even though the seller (bank) is not paying us. We waive it because it’s the right thing to do. The seller is sending many listings our way, and we are going to show them our appreciation for those listings by charging our administrative fee to the buyer?! No. That would be wrong.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under Real Estate Chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. caroline carrara said at March 17th, 2009 at 3:46 pm

   Love the title, caught my eye immediately…and the topic…

2. Boston Luxury Apartments said at May 7th, 2009 at 1:13 am

   I had a seller agent tell me he would not pay me any of the commission and I would have to get something from my client. sheesh

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