It’s Criminal a Victoria Real Estate Commission Story

It would be a crime to say that there is one typical real estate commission in Victoria, or anywhere in Canada for that matter.

As a licensed REALTOR® in Victoria BC since 2005, it surprises me how quickly the topic or commission comes up, long before one compares services or better yet results, sellers ask us what is your Real Estate Commission?

Now as a REALTOR®, I do see a prevailing real estate commission that is repeated in about 80% of the Victoria MLS listed homes, and I could very easily say that this would be the typical commission, but I am not kidding, I would be in breach of the law. You see the Competition Bureau will not allow us to say things like “Victoria real estate commission is typically” or “a standard real estate commission in Victoria is” or “Victoria MLS Listings, typically have a real estate commission of X”, so do not be upset if you cannot get a straight answer out of an agent on the phone?

Now before we go any further, let me pose this question to you, if you were about to undergo surgery, would you be asking your doctor to work for less than he is used to, or less than 80% of his colleagues? I did not think so, in a perfect world you would want to know how many of these surgeries he or she had performed, what the success rate was, and more important questions far too great to list.

Again I hope you do not think I am saying, that discount agencies who operate on an alternative real estate commission plans are not as ethical, get different results, net their clients less, or anything of the sort, for that too would be in breach of the Competition Bureaus’ guidelines which basically defend free enterprise and encourage competition and discourage collusion. In the end it all comes down to choices, and wit that said, the Victoria real estate market offers a great variety of choices. You can now choose real estate commissions as low as $500, and as high as 5% of the sale price depending on the situation. So go for it, pick the one that suites you, after all it’s you decision it’s your home, and it definitely is your hard earned equity that can evaporate quickly by making the wrong choice.

Maybe you ought to ask what you get for your dollars, I know I would, and with over 1300 REALTORS® in Victoria BC alone, there, really is a vast difference among good and great. So how do you measure the difference, what should you look for when selecting you REALTOR®?

Bottom line is this, no matter what you are choosing, from mechanics to lawyers, vacations to toilets, you typically cannot get more for less, and it simply does not make sense that someone would provide better results for less money, or that an agent would work harder to sell your home for half the typical Victoria real estate commission. So buyer beware, or as John Ruskin put it “There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.”

So after all that dancing around real estate commission I can assure you that my practice is not to charge a typical real estate commission, nor to be inflexible, on the contrary, real estate commission is and always should be negotiable, and even a step farther, should be unique as is our policy. After all if you always do what you have always done you will always get what you have always gotten, and our results are far from typical.