Real estate commissions

OK, so it's a two-year old article in the Times. But I didn't want to lose track of this. See how one couple lowered their real eastate commissions:

Stan and Gloria Wakefield are no fools. They built their three-bedroom house 12 years ago in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., an oceanside resort community dotted with golf courses and picturesque inland waterways. The real estate market in the area, near Jacksonville, took off and the house, overlooking lagoons, rose in value to nearly $1 million. "This house has appreciated almost obscenely, " said Mr. Wakefield, a retired naval intelligence officer.

What the Wakefields did next should scare real estate agents everywhere.

They decided to put their house on the market this year, and concluded that the house would sell itself. So why pay a real estate agent a 6 percent commission? They tried negotiating a lower commission with prospective agents, who stood to make about $60,000, but the best they could get was 4.5 percent - and 5.5 percent if the agent had to share the commission with a buyer's agent.

They chose instead to list their property with one of the many real estate services that are challenging conventional brokerage firms, in this case, Assist2sell.com, an agency that charges a flat fee instead of a commission. The Wakefields had an offer within six days and sold their home for $985,000, paying a $10,000 fee to Assist2sell and $14,775 to the agent who brought in the buyer, for a savings of about
$30,000 over a conventional broker.

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