November 28, 2004 09:30 PM
Realtors Engage In Turf Battle With Discounters
Excerpt: Although Realtors facilitate transactions between homebuyers and homesellers, they've always been optional. You can buy or sell a home on your own, with no middleman, and the Internet has made it easier for buyers to check out once-secret lists of properties for sale. No longer do potential buyers have to rely on classified ads or neighborhood drives if they want to search for available homes on their own.
Facing competition from discount firms that offer similar services for as little as half the price, real estate agents in the United States are promoting themselves with a familiar mantra: You get what you pay for.
If they hire traditional Realtors, customers will "have someone who knows how to market a home, who knows how to complete a transaction, not just someone who throws up a sign," says real estate agent Dusty Showers, who serves the Tampa, Fla., suburb of Palm Harbor.
But rising commissions, which have gone up with home prices, may boost arguments that Realtors are overrated and overpaid. "A lot of people are looking at that and going, 'What has changed so much that justified me spending literally tens of thousands of dollars to conclude a deal that I did just five years ago for half that amount?' " says Van Davis, chief executive officer of Foxtons, a discount brokerage in the Northeast.
At stake are the pocketbooks of the millions of Americans who buy homes each year, and the careers of the estimated 1 million real estate agents in the US.
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