The realtor’s commission should be paid by the landlord!

Look: say I’m look­ing for an office to rent, right?

I call the num­bers in the ads, and almost every­where it’s agents who answer, not owners.

Why? Because prop­erty owners usu­ally hand the let­ting over to their agents. What’s in it for them?

1. The agent runs around (rings around) the classified-ad papers;
2. The agent shows the premises to prospec­tive ten­ants (buyers) sev­eral times a day;
3. The agent answers a pile of calls from the merely curious.

So the agent per­forms some useful functions. But useful for whom? For the prop­erty owner.

Moving on…

I turn up, the tenant, want­ing to rent a place for some kind of legal activity. We agree on the price and the terms and (atten­tion, here comes the trick) on the price I’ll pay the agent.

And now, the ques­tion! What good has the agent done me, the buyer, that I pay him, as a rule, 50% of a month’s rent? So the agent works for the prop­erty owner, and his wages are paid by the tenants?

It’s fair to assume that the com­mis­sion should be paid by who­ever gets the income, not the other way round.

Having thought all this through, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that the rules of the game in this busi­ness need to change into some­thing more sensible. All the more so because now is exactly the right time: the prop­erty market has turned from a seller’s market into a buyer’s market, where supply far exceeds demand. In a market like that, it’s the buyer (the tenant) who has the “power”.

The only thing miss­ing is some kind of con­sol­i­dated response from buyers, some kind of action. I think we could start with arti­cles in the media, and from there the shift in empha­sis won’t be far off.