« Ontario housing starts up 29% | Main | Canadian home prices rise 8.8% »
Toronto Life says:
Realtors are still trying to keep the public’s hands off MLS, but you can’t hoard information in the information age
The main incentive for selling your own home is, of course, to avoid paying the real estate agent’s fees, which can be enormous, usually amounting to five per cent of the value of your biggest asset. A DIY seller of a $431,000 house (the average house price in Toronto in 2010) would save $24,350 (including HST). You could buy a new car for that. Even if your buyer uses an agent, which most buyers do, and you’re on the hook to pay a 2.5 per cent commission, you’d still save more than 10 grand. In the same dramatic way consumers dumped travel agents to buy cruises, hotels and plane tickets over the Internet, I expect that we will soon be rethinking the way we use real estate agents, if we use them at all.
For the moment, we still need agents—not because of all the services they provide, but because of just one. We can’t list our homes on MLS.ca without them. MLS, the Multiple Listings Service, accounts for 90 per cent of all residential sales in Canada. House hunters can browse the site (and nose around their neighbour’s kitchen, right down to the Sub-Zero refrigerator), but the Canadian Real Estate Association controls the flow of information and carefully guards the most up-to-date data about sales.
Until last fall, CREA rules dictated that only traditional agents—those representing clients through the entire process, from appraisal to final sale—were allowed to list on the database. This gave CREA and its member boards across the country a virtual monopoly on real estate listings.
See Toronto Life article by Jan Wong »
March 10, 2011 in Toronto Real Estate Trends | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c51e453ef0147e31ef4e1970b
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Toronto Life says: :
Comments
You posts really matters! because it is very valueable.
Posted by: Tina | Jan 9, 2013 7:27:38 AM
Nice blog and nice post, The topic here i found is really effective.
Posted by: Prank Calls | Nov 2, 2012 5:43:39 AM
I am so glad to see this. Meat definitely needs to be cooked to a certain point. This is not good for you when it is not cooked to this point.
Posted by: Uphill Rush 2 | Oct 12, 2012 1:09:00 AM
Great blog always offer the best and authentic information without creating exaggeration. This blog has given me opportunity to learn many things regarding products and services
Posted by: Ann Arbor Celliuite MI | Sep 24, 2012 1:24:27 AM
Realtors are still needed...but their commission structure can be changed. As consumers are doing more on their own, it's just fair that commissions come down in price. www.sundaybell.com is a good options: negotiate anonymously with agents and determine what you really need prior to signing any buyer or seller agreements.
Posted by: Information Technology Outsourcing Toronto | Sep 18, 2012 5:17:36 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.
