It is striking to me, that so many flat fee brokers have zero online customer reviews, or only complaints. How can this be?
In our experience, at first many of BuySelf Realty's customers have a “too good to be true” fear about our service—there must be some catch, or bad news. They wonder—how can the service cost so little? They would really like to see the reviews or talk to past customers to make them feel more comfortable with this “new” way of home sales. The seller decides to use our service but has that fear, until they walk out of closing with a much larger check than they would have had. Then, they have an overwhelming feeling of joy and pride at successfully executing a sale. They are the first person they knew to do a self MLS listing, and would like to take the fear out of the process for others. They write a flat fee mls recommendation, they tell others. That's what our customers do, and that is why BuySelf Realty is approaching 50 online reviews.
Checking for online reviews and complaints is also a way to get rid of the most questionable flat fee MLS websites out there. There is one flat fee guy we know of that has over 250 flat fee websites, each one with a different city name, but the websites don't mention a company name. Without a company name, a seller can't research anything, or know how many complaints customers have had. These websites purpose is clear to me, to try to fool search engines and sellers alike—to pretend they are a broker, even though they do not have any kind of real estate license. It is unlikely you will find more than one or two reviews for such a website, at best, and most likely there will be zero reviews.
There is another website out there that claims 20,000 listings, and yet to date they have zero positive reviews on Google and two complaints on Yahoo Local. That fact speaks volumes about how that company's customers feel about the service. Any established flat fee broker should have lots of online reviews. Zero reviews means (take your pick) either (1) a company/website is not established, or (2) their customers apparently don't have positive things to say about the service.
At BuySelf Realty, we are proud to be the highest rated Flat Fee MLS Listing Broker. Those 50+ reviews are the proof we have long been looking for to distinguish our service from the low quality and ineffective brokers out there. Don't get me wrong, there are Flat Fee Brokers out there that have my respect and admiration. I don't feel bad when a seller chooses them over us, I am reasonably confident the seller will have a good experience. But when we find out a seller has gone to one of the bad players, that is disappointing—we can't tell the seller that they are making a mistake, but they sure are. In the worst case, we later see that same person making an online complaint about their experience. Sometimes they even lump all the flat fee brokers into the same bad category: “flat fee MLS doesn't work.” I'm glad most people can see through that, and look at the long track record of success our sellers have had.
The definition of Established
1. (of a custom, belief, practice, or institution) Having been in existence for a long time and therefore generally accepted.
2. (of a person) Recognized and accepted in a particular capacity.
It is worth repeating: Any established flat fee broker should have lots of online reviews.
Any established flat fee broker should have lots of online reviews.
Any established flat fee broker should have lots of online reviews.
I've seen too many sellers who made an excellent decision to go flat fee and save $8,000 on average, only to lose everything by choosing an unestablished broker in an attempt to save $8,100. Choose wisely.