Ethical Homes

On March 1st, 2004, Ethical Homes Real Estate Consulting was created, with a vision of changing the way that consumers bought and sold real estate.

For years before I became a licensed Realtor, I was amazed at the number of people that I knew (including myself) who were less than satisfied by the agents that they worked with when buying or selling a home. Almost all of the people that I knew who bought a home in that time felt that their agents had done almost nothing to help them beyond showing them homes, and as often as not, the homes that those agents showed them were nothing like what the homebuyers in question had said they were interested in. Buyers often felt like they had been railroaded into a particular purchase, and sellers likewise thought that they were pressured to accept an offer lower than they thought their home was worth. Many felt that their agent had been most concerned about just getting a sale so that the agent could collect their commission. Others complained that they were simply overwhelmed by the process, and never really understood the details of what was happening; some found that listening to their agent’s advice about concessions that buyers “had” to make in the then-burgeoning seller’s market here in the DC area led to those buyers making bad decisions that cost them tens of thousands of dollars.

When I started Ethical Homes, my goal was to change all of that—to create a company that consumers could view as a trusted advisor, helping them to make the right decisions about how, when, and why they should buy or sell real estate, and providing them with the systems to implement those decisions with the least hassle possible. As the saying goes, “if you build it, they will come”—as our reputation for excellent service grew, so did the number of people who came to us because of referrals from others who had worked with us before. 2005 was a busy year for us at Ethical Homes; thanks to all of the referrals and recommendations that we got from clients, customers, and other advocates in the community, in our second year in business we were able to help more than four times as many people buy or sell real estate as we did in 2004.

That same steady stream of referrals also meant that we didn’t have to spend all of our time looking for new clients, and as a result we were also able to offer advice, information, and referrals to other agents to literally scores of consumers who were unlikely to buy or sell for months or years, and who would otherwise have probably not been able to find a Realtor with the time to spend on them. Unlike most Realtors, our internal measure of success is the number of people who think of us as their trusted advisor, rather than the dollar value of homes we sell, and we’d like to help even more people in 2006; if you know of anyone who is thinking about buying or selling real estate, no matter how far in the future or how tentative their plans, please don’t hesitate to put them in touch with us—we’d be thrilled to talk to them, and help out in any way that we can.

Thanks again to everyone who has helped us during the last two years—we couldn’t have done it without you. We’ve got some exciting changes coming up at Ethical Homes in the next few weeks, and even more over the coming years.