Even though the staff at Ethical Homes are conversant with many of the topics that affect real estate, their specialty is in real estate agency (the negotiation and purchase/sale of real estate) and mortgage brokerage; for questions about topics outside of those areas, you should always talk to a licensed professional who specializes in dealing with your specific concern. In particular, Ethical Homes does not specialize in any of the following topics:

• Law (including, but not limited to, contract law and real estate law)
• Tax Accounting
• Financial Planning
• Insurance
• Home Inspections
• Environmental Inspections (including, but not limited to, radon and mold inspections)
• Appraisal
• Property Surveying
• Title/Deed Research
• Architecture
• Engineering, Construction, Repair, and Remodeling

If you have concerns about any of these topics, please make sure to talk to an outside expert. Additionally, in most jurisdictions where Ethical Homes operates, we are not allowed by law to act as both a mortgage broker and a real estate agent on the same transaction, so if we are acting in one of those two capacities for you, you would need to address specific concerns about the other specialty with the person who is officially acting in that other capacity.

If you need a recommendation for a trusted professional in one of these areas, contact us and we would be glad to help you find one.

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1. For Sale By Owner
2. (Effectively) Free Real Estate Training For Military Spouses
3. Disclosures

This is a serious issue, because many real estate and mortgage brokerages (wrongly) feel entitled to certain minimum commission levels, and have in the past attempted to collude to fix commissions in specific areas at specific levels. The government takes a dim view of this, thankfully, but in their zeal to prevent such collusion, they sometimes have been known to prosecute brokers and agents for simply mentioning current trends in local commission levels in the presence of other brokers, on the theory that doing so is an attempt to communicate to each other their desires for a specific target commission that all brokers will then charge.

We want consumers to be as informed as possible, but we also want to avoid being fined $1 million and going to jail for 3 years (the maximum penalty the government can impose for an anti-trust violation of this sort), so to be explicit: any and all commission numbers that we provide on our website and in our training materials are purely for educational purposes. We try to make those numbers correspond to the most common values that we are seeing in the market today, so that consumers can get a better idea of the actual numbers that they will see in their transactions, but again, these numbers are purely descriptive of the most common (mode or median) values that we are seeing, or in some cases rounded off versions of those numbers designed to make the relevant math more easily understood by consumers.

In general, then, the numbers that we tend to use in our examples are:

• Typical buyer agency commision: buyer pays buyer’s agent 3% of sales price
• Typical seller agency commision: seller pays seller’s agent 6% of sales price
• Typical seller agent cooperative commision: seller’s agent pays buyer’s agent 3% of sales price

Again, these numbers are purely for educational purposes and are intended to be descriptive of numbers that consumers will often find in the local DC marketplace; we ourselves often charge commissions and/or offer cooperative commissions that are higher or lower than these, so we fully support (and encourage) the right of other brokers to charge whatever commission they see fit.

Possibly related posts (automatically generated):

1. An Overview of Buyer Agency In The Metro DC Area
2. Info for attendees of the September 2nd AHOME Seminar
3. Using Seller-Assisted Financing To Sell Your Listings Faster & For A Higher Price