BuySelf Realty recently passed a significant milestone--our 15,000th listing. We are honored and feel privileged to be one of the pioneers and survivors of the flat fee MLS movement, if you can call it that.
As you can imagine, 15,000 different people who have used our service to sell a property all had a different situation-sellers have listed multi-million dollar luxury properties to the simplest and most inexpensive lot or small home. We've had real estate experts from real estate attorneys to traditional agents do flat fee listings with us, as well as people who didn't know anything about real estate who needed lots of coaching and help along the way.
We have had sellers sell in a few hours with multiple offers and sellers that stuck with it through difficult markets and sold after a long time on the market.
We have seen competitors come and go. Many don't understand the level of expertise it takes to do flat fee MLS well. They don't realize how much our experience has made our customers sell faster and have a smoother home sale process. Don''t get me wrong, our attention to detail and good customer relationships (along with good relationships with traditional agents) are important, but too often I have seen the new flat fee mls brokers focusing on the wrong details, to the detriment of their sellers.
Flat Fee MLS works, and it works well with the right broker. At our current pace, it won't take us another decade to get to 30,000 sellers, and I look forward to the future.
Some of the things I would have done differently when I started in Flat Fee Listings in 1998, had I known then what I know now:
1. Buy more domain names. Back when I started domain names cost 3 or 4 times what they do now. I could have kept my competitors from getting some of the domain names that are almost as good as ours, and thereby gotten more traffic.
2. Organize other brokers sooner rather than later. I didn't start recruiting other flat fee brokers into a national organization until 2004 or so. Our industry has benefited so much from brokers talking and learning from each other we would definitely be ahead of where we are now if our organization had started 7-8 years ago.
3. Realize that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Or in my case, blatant copying or our copyrighted material. I used to get upset (ok, sometimes I still do get upset sometimes) when I find a competitor who has copied some or all of our website. Some all or our highly evolved writings from our website, our listing agreements, you name it, I have seen it copied. One person once asked for permission to copy, which I granted. But I have lost count of how many flat fee brokers I have found that have our text word for word on them. I realize I could sue these brokers, and probably get them in trouble for violating the Realtor Code of Ethics, but I take the long view for this industry. I just hope they don't think I haven't noticed (you know who you are if you are reading this.)
Our customer service team is figuring out the best way for us to commemorate this milestone. I will let you know what they suggest.
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