Hello it’s Debbie De Grote and welcome to Debbie’s Tips and today we’re going to talk about how to hold the line on commission now of course we all know that Commission’s are negotiable by law so therefore as a great salesperson it falls on you to really prove to the seller that you are worth the rate of commission that you are asking them to pay now we all know that a real estate transaction today is far more complicated than in years past and it’s not unusual for sellers to ask listing agents to pay for expensive marketing Home Staging and of course there is the legal liability that goes along with each and every transaction so in other words when you do a terrific job marketing and selling a property you haven’t invested an enormous amount of time and money and that’s exactly why you need to determine the rate of commission that’s acceptable to you and allows you to do the proper job for the seller and then it’s up to you to explain all of this to the seller and negotiate with them what you feel is appropriate now as I speak to agents across North America of course the average rate of commission paid can vary drastically sometimes even just inside of a single state or county I see markets where six and seven is commonly paid I see others where four and five is more than norm so as I said it does vary drastically let’s talk about this though why is it that most sellers today will usually grind on commission sometimes grinding so much it causes them to end up with a cut-rate agent that will not provide the services and exposure needed to sell the property at the highest price well there are a few potential reasons maybe they’ve had a bad experience and they really don’t speak think much of real estate agents in general maybe they’ve not seen a presentation that inspired them and they don’t feel the agents were worth the fee maybe they felt selling the home would be easy and they don’t think the agent would actually have to earn their money or they could just be unreasonable and difficult to work with or here’s one as a savvy consumer they feel that they should at least ask the question just in case the agent would be willing to cut knowing though that if they feel that agent brings value they would pay more okay so I’m not going to stand here and tell you to take X rate of commission or walk away that’s a business decision you need to make but what I am going to ask you to do is go in there prepared to defend the Commission that you feel you deserve and makes it a good business decision to take this listing okay and we’ll have more for you on future Debbies’ Tip’s on holding the line on commission have a great day I’ll talk to you soon.