Pros and Cons of a Flat Fee MLS Florida Listing

For example, you might see paid ads for flat fee MLS Florida listing brokers who promise you a “completely free” listing. So what’s the catch? Well, if you do your due diligence and exercise some critical thinking, you’ll realize that these brokers often try to “catch” you via one of two ways.

Hidden fees after you sign up

If you look past the fine print, you’ll often find that offers of a “free” flat fee MLS listing in Florida are often deceptive. Not only will they typically nickel and dime you for every change or request that you make for your listing, they’ll often charge you a significant fee at closing.

These closing fees can range from a few hundred dollars to a percentage of your closing price. Furthermore, some providers will have strict terms for offering you a “free” listing, such as tying other affiliated services such as title insurance that you must use.

For example, some “integrated” real estate firms may force their buyers and sellers to use their mortgage brokerage, title insurance and escrow services in return for discounted real estate brokerage services.

Lead interception

Another hidden danger of working with a disreputable or dishonest flat fee MLS listing broker in Florida is that they will use your listing to simply steal your leads. Essentially, they will list your property for “free” or a nominal fee, but use your listing as an opportunity to get free direct buyer leads which they’ll push to other properties where they can collect a buyer commission.

In this nightmare scenario, perhaps the only thing you might hope to get out of it is that they’ll at least forward you inquiries from buyer’s agents. However, this would still condemn you to paying at least the buyer agent commission (i.e. 2.5% to 3%), without ever having a chance to truly find a direct buyer and save all 6%.

In contrast, sellers with Hauseit never have to worry about lead interception because of our automated, server level email filtering rules which automatically forward inquiries to sellers. Even though our email filtering rules are quite accurate, we also have a human staff who double-check inquiries to make sure that everything has been forwarded. In fact, as of this writing, it’s standard practice for our team to text alert sellers each inquiry that has been auto forwarded to them.

Most importantly, it comes down to reputation. Hauseit has helped thousands of buyers and sellers save money on often the most important transaction of their lives. Make sure to thoroughly diligence any provider’s reviews and testimonials. For example, not only can you search for “Hauseit reviews” and find written reviews about us on a variety of 3rd party sites, you can also watch video testimonials from our happy customers on our website.

Pro Tip: Read the fine print about what happens in the case of a direct buyer. Some flat fee MLS brokers in Florida are so unscrupulous that they’ll by default become the buyer’s broker, and thus be eligible to collect the buyer agent commission, meaning you never had a chance to only pay a flat fee.

Sellers are usually tempted to try a flat fee MLS listing in Florida due to the low advertised cost. After all, what’s the harm in giving anything a shot if it doesn’t cost very much?

While this is a great argument if you are working with a trusted, time-tested service like Hauseit, you could lose much more than whatever fee you paid if you happen to work with an unscrupulous flat fee broker.

For example, if you sign up with an unscrupulous flat fee MLS listing Realtor who has no interest in seeing you succeed, you could get jerked around and completely fail to sell. This could be due to unprofessional marketing or photos, incomplete syndication, incorrect listing details, not forwarding you inquiries in a timely manner or at all, or simply intercepting direct buyer leads.

Whatever the reason, there are heavy indirect costs to putting your house on the market and failing to sell. That’s because any prospective buyer is going to be able to see your listing history on a plethora of 3rd party listing sites.

They might interpret this as a sign of weakness, or worse, that there’s something wrong with your property that other buyers discovered. Don’t you think this hurts your chances of actually selling when you decide to try again, seriously?

Therefore, remove the notion from your mind that it’s a free lunch. If you mess up your sale attempt by listing with a dishonest or simply incompetent flat fee Realtor, you may permanently impair your chances of selling in the future, and/or selling at the market value of your home.

A great reason for sellers wanting to try a flat fee MLS Florida listing is to have more control and say over the marketing and sale process. For example, Hauseit’s Agent Assisted FSBO sellers are able to choose how their listing is presented in terms of the listing description, professional photos, listing price, open houses etc.

Hauseit Agent Assisted FSBO sellers are also able to update their listing when they want, and how they want, via our listing update tool on the Hauseit website.

They can show the apartment when they want, and get back to buyers’ requests immediately without having to wait for the showing request to filter through a middleman.

They can hold as many open houses as they want, without having to beg a listing agent who may be too lazy or too busy to be bothered with holding an open house.

A flat fee MLS Florida listing may be a good fit for sellers who are very particular or detailed, who want things done and presented in a specific way, and who think they can do a better job pitching their home than some agent who’s never lived there.

However, on the flip side you may have very little control over the process if you end up paying for a flat fee listing with an unscrupulous Florida Realtor who doesn’t care at all about your sale. In this sad situation, you may be stuck with your home improperly listed online, with no way to change it. Your calls get ignored and you never hear back from the flat fee company you listed with.

One of the scariest and most frustrating things for a home seller is to have their most precious asset listed for sale, perhaps improperly, unprofessionally or with lots of mistakes, and to be unable to contact the listing Realtor to fix their listing.

Yet this is one of the greatest risks of listing with a flat fee MLS Florida listing broker, given the relatively low barriers to entry to set up your own flat fee listing operation. As a result, you could probably find a dime a dozen of these one man shops advertising low fees to market your property.

Sometimes, it might get so bad that you might have to resort to complaining your the local MLS or Department of State to get your property de-listed. After all, there’s a reason why unprofessional chop shops are often called “fly-by-night” operations.

They simply might not be around the next morning! Perhaps the proprietor gave up, decided they weren’t interested in trying anymore, or simply fell off the face of the earth!

Unprofessional marketing

Sometimes, a newer, inexperienced or simply unprofessional flat fee listing broker will incorrectly or embarrassingly advertise your home, perhaps with the wrong photos, the wrong listing description, the wrong price, the wrong property type or a myriad of other reasons. Perhaps the flat fee listing Realtor forgot to syndicate your listing to any number of important portals such as Realtor.com or Zillow or Homes.com.

These errors can actually be quite devastating to a sale process, especially considering how important first impressions are when it comes to real estate sale processes.

For example, when a property is first listed is when it gets the most eyeballs. That’s because most buyers and agents have search alerts set up which automatically alert them of new listings that meet their criteria. As a result, you’ll get the most number of eyeballs when you first list.

However, what if an unprofessional flat fee listing company completely botches your listing and uploads it? Then you’ll have wasted this opportunity to put a spotlight on your property, and perhaps permanently harmed your chances of being able to sell at all.