26 Years in Wilmington Real Estate: Why I Now Work Exclusively With Sellers (And What That Means for You)

In the past few months, I would say earlier this year, I have celebrated spending about 26 years in the real estate business here in the Wilmington area and of course I'm lifelong been here all my whole life. Grew up here, went to Wilmington Christian Academy K-12, graduated UNCW with a business degree and also a minor in computer science. Of course, that's a whole different world as that was Cobalt and Pascal back then, which is not a lot of use now. But anyway, a lot has changed in real estate and the way things are done. And after all these years, I've realized I've been a broker owner, I owned the Remaxes here for 10 years. I had my own independent firm for 3 or 4 years and then I came back to where I started, which is Coal Banker Seacoast and really happy that I did. But the one of the things I noticed is I sometimes get out of my lane at what I'm good at. I've built brokerages, I've built teams, I've built companies, offices, I've built manufactured homes, my dealer license there. I've even built SaaS platforms such as GuaranteedSale.com and FreehouseValues.com and even something called BuddyTheBlogger.com. And while I like that stuff, that's just not what I'm good at and gifted at. And I've always said that sometimes I think God slaps me back in my lane to where I need to be. So, this year I made a conscious effort to spend my time. And when I say mine, I mean my personal time. I work with my team members. I certainly work with our clients, problem solving, helping through negotiations and things like that with all of our team agents. But me personally, I work with sellers. When I made a decision to just work with sellers, nothing against buyers, but I've got buyer agents. They've bought hundreds of homes over the course of months. They know all the new construction neighborhoods. They know all this stuff. But if I'm going to do a really, really good job, and I think I do for my sellers in marketing, strategy, negotiating, positioning, having hard conversations with them, keeping deals together, and things like that, I think I need to dedicate my time to doing that, not trying to represent dual agency personally and doing things like that. So I don't know of many other people or anybody that's ever done this, certainly in our area where I just work with sellers. So when you work with me as a seller, I'm going to charge you a listing commission. And then you're going to have a choice to make, especially after the new laws with NAR a couple years ago of how the seller has choices and what they, or if they, offer buyer agents as commission included in the deal. So when I list a house, it's going to be for X percent. And I am not the cheapest guy in town. I'm not ridiculously expensive, but I'm extremely well worth it because I will save you money and make you more net bottom dollars. Not so much in just the marketing, because that's been kind of diluted down with the Zillows and everything else. Marketing is not going to... so your house, of your advice that we give, the negotiation, and keeping the doggone deal together is going to make more of a difference than anything else. But going back to that, so the way that I've decided to do is I charge a listing fee. And when I list a house, let's just say a buyer calls me and they don't have an agent. And it just happened this last weekend. An agent calls off of one of my marketing pieces online. It was actually a Zillow ad, Showcase Zillow, which I do on most of our houses, depending on the house, and the price, and the area, and the budget. And I told the buyer, I said, listen, I represent the seller. I'm not interested in doing buyer agency. So just understand, you would be an unrepresented buyer. And they know that. They sign it. And some buyers prefer to deal with a listing agent for a number of reasons. So I went out and showed the house. And I worked for the seller. It put me in a really beautiful position. My seller liked it because it was clean. And that house did not sale to that buyer, which is OK. But it was interesting because the buyer told me on the phone he wanted to work with a listing agent only. But then he said at the end of it, hey, would you mind helping us find a home as our buyer's agent? I said, man, I really appreciate it. I'm honored that you would ask. But I'm not your guy to do that. I can't do my job well representing my sellers, and not just this seller, but all the sellers that entrust their house with me, and their property with me, which is hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. I can't do that job well if I'm trying to run around, show 10 houses in a day, and people. can't get me on the phone, can't get up with me because I'm too busy with buyers, dedicating my focus on them. So what I did is I said, hey, here is an agent on my team, because I do have a team. We got a number of fantastic buyer agents. Some of them are also doing some listings. They're growing in that. I'm teaching them. I go with them on the listing appointments to try to help them. And I'm still involved with the problem solving and even some of the negotiation to help them out as part of being on our team. And that worked out real well. I gave them a great name of a lender that I use, insurance person I use personally, and they can choose to not use them or not. So what does that mean for the seller? I'll give an example. Let's say that I charge $1 to list your house. Well, what that means is if it's an unrepresented buyer and I had sold it, it would still only be $1. So for the seller, they would be paying less commission. And in effect, the buyer, who actually pays all the commission, you can call it however you want to. The buyer is bringing the money to the table. They would not pay it either. So I'm certainly not trying to shortcut buyer's agents. But in today's world, sellers have three choices the way I look at it. When they want to decide what they're going to do with buyer agents, they can offer a fee, whatever the number. You call a number, whatever you want. And then we tell the other agent. And when they call, say, what's your buyer agent commission? As a listing agent, I'd say it is blank. No matter what the offer looks like, this is what we're offering. Number two, which more and more sellers are doing, and which I would do if I was selling, to be honest, it's not popular with buyer agents. It's not popular with real estate companies in a lot of cases, but it is the true essence of what I think that the lawsuit was about, where everything is about negotiation, where I say, listen, give me the permission to say, I can't give you a fixed amount, but what I can tell you is, based on the offer and the terms, the seller is willing to entertain you presenting an offer along with your buyer's agent's compensation included in it. And then we'll look at it on a case-by-case basis. And that really is a strong position for the seller and the buyer, to be honest with you, to put their best case forward and truly negotiate in its truest sense. And then their third option is just for a seller, which I never encourage, but they certainly have the right to do, is say, no, I'm not ever paying anything. Because the reason I say that is, there's an awful lot of buyers, especially if they're borrowing, VA buyers, for instance, military veterans, they're borrowing 100% of the money because they have that benefit after serving our country, it's a benefit to them they've more than deserved. They can't pay their buyer agent. And quite honestly, your value of your house and your appraisal that you last did and would do factors in what the commission was, because that was in the house when you bought it. So I think it's a matter of really looking at it. I think it's a decision, do you really want to negotiate? I love negotiating. And negotiations just begin once you get it under contract. Because keep in mind, we have to sell the house four times. That's just the way it is. It's always been this way. And it's always going to be this way. And you can market to your blue in the face, but marketing cannot fix a house that's just overpriced. priced, but we have to sell the house or the property to the buyer when they find it online, probably themselves. Number two is we got to sell it to their buyer's agent if they have a buyer's agent. Number three is we got to sell it to the home inspector. And then I'm just going to tell you expectation wise, be prepared to deal with that stuff. I don't care if it's a new house or if you think it's perfect, you're going to have to deal with it. I'm not going to say you have to fix everything on here because you don't have to do anything, but you could lose your deal over it. And when you go back on the market after being under contract, it's very unlikely you're going to get the same terms and price that you had on the original offer. And then of course, you have to sell it to the appraisal, to the appraiser if there's a loan involved. So you have to sell it four times and then you got to do everything you can to keep the whole deal together, to navigate it. And the real work begins once it goes under contract. That's what people don't realize. And then the other real work as a seller's agent is having really hard conversations about pricing and expectations up front, especially in the world we're in now where we came off a market where the last thing that a seller might remember is 10 offers and their neighbor got this and this happened. And well, that's just not the way the world works now in most parts of the country. But things are different, but that's just, I made a decision to do that. I like my decision and I like my position because I know exactly who I work for. I'm never going to make it really murky where people are wondering, you know, am I trying to just double dip to get a little more commission or something like that? And again, if a buyer comes along, I send it to one of my buyers. agents. If I don't want to use one of my buyer agents, I've got other agents in our company and even other companies I could refer depending on, just depending on whatever the buyer wants. But it's just really clean for me and it feels good for me. I think that you're going to see more people do this as the industry changes. But it is not very popular with some buyer agents and companies because they have to work harder. They have to negotiate. It's not my job as a listing agent to negotiate the buyer agent's commission. I think that's kind of part of the problem that the lawsuit was about. So stand up for yourself. If you can't negotiate your own commission, how good a job are you going to negotiate to get, if you're a buyer agent, the best price for your buyer or if you're a seller agent, the highest price for your seller. If you can't stand up for my commission, how am I going to stand up for your dollar value? That's kind of my attitude. I don't mean to be flippant, but that is the truth.

🎙️ Buddy The Blogger Podcast — Episode 26 Years in Wilmington Real Estate: Why I Now Work Exclusively With Sellers (And What That Means for You) After 26 years living and working in Wilmington real estate, Buddy Blake made a bold decision: work exclusively with sellers. Here's the full story, the strategy behind it, and exactly what it means for homeowners who want to net the most money possible. 📖 Read the full blog post: https://www.buddyblake.com/blog/26-years-in-wilmington-real-estate-why-i-now-work ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ About Your Host Buddy Blake, Buddy Blake Real Estate 📍 Wilmington, NC 🌐 https://buddyblake.com 💼 Sell Your Home & Keep The Most $: https://buddyblake.sale 📱 Follow & Connect: • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@buddyblakenc • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buddyblakedotcom ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🚀 Powered by Buddy The Blogger https://www.buddytheblogger.com Create your own AI-powered real estate content & podcast → https://www.buddytheblogger.com/features/voice-to-content Created by Buddy Blake https://buddyblake.com Contact: buddy@buddyblake.com