An uproar seems to be brewing about the huge commisions that real estate agents and brokers appear to be making, despite apparently doing little work to justify it…..
In an RISMedia news report on May14, 2007 (no writer was credited), it was stated that The real estate piece featuring Redfin that aired Sunday on the popular television program “60 Minutes” prompted broad reaction throughout the whole industry, and in particularly on real estate related weblogs.
The 60 minute piece in question had zeroed in on how the world wide web has been changing the real estate community by essentially spotlighting the Puget Sound are discount broker Redfin and it’s founder, Glen Kelman…………………Kelman has stated that the real estate industry “is the most screwed up industry in America, and we feel like things that Amazon or eBay or Yahoo have done of other industries, we can do for the real estate industry.”{perhaps like how they affected the stock broking industry?}
In anay case The RISmedia publisher responded to the piec by saying that the television segment “……..misleads consumers into thinking that all their Realtor does is list their property-or only does ‘four hours worth of work’ as the former traditional agent in the piece noted-and they walk away with thousands of dollars for doing nothing. This is a gross misrepresentation of the work Realtors do for their clients to increase the value of their homes and justify their commissions.”
I can only say that, where I live, a friend of my father, who happens to be a real estate agent himself, bragged about how he just made a $90,000 commision for doing a few hours work on a particular real estate deal. Of course, I live in the state of Hawaii where the real estate prices are unusually high in many area’s…..million dollar homes are quite common here in fact…