By DANIEL NASH
Issaquah Reporter Staff Writer
You decide to sell your house. You hire a real estate broker to list, prep and show the property. After an open house, several appointments and several dead ends, it sells.
In the end, the price for service is a percentage commission paid by the seller and split between the seller’s and buyer’s agents. That commission fluctuates; the standard accepted amount is 6 percent.
But one area family of real estate professionals believes its online brokerage can bring that commission down to 1 percent.
Sam and Dee Owens and their son Tim launched ReallyOne.com on May 1 with their eyes on attracting homesellers with a minimal commission rate — accomplished by automating processes like listing on the Northwest Multiple Listing Service and putting sellers in charge of tasks like taking photos and showing their property.
“A lot of homeowners love their houses so much, they think they can do a better job selling than the listers,” CEO Sam Owens said. “And the truth is, they know their town, they know their schools and they know things about their community an agent might not.”
The process sacrifices standbys like the open house, but Sam said those often benefit an agent more than a seller.
The idea came from a family breakfast, Sam said. Sam, reading the sports page, looked over the corner of his newspaper to see his two sons on their iPads. He assumed they were playing games or fooling around, but when he asked what they were doing, they told him they were also catching up on the news — as many news services as they liked over the Internet. Over time, he began to wonder whether those same advancements could be applied to real estate, he said.
Sam and Dee enlisted their web-savvy son Tim, now the company’s CTO, to build the website.
“We were kind of educating them (about real estate) as we educated ourselves,” Sam said.
Despite operating as an online business, the Owens have leaned on paper marketing, fliers and ads, plus word-of-mouth, to get the word out.
ReallyOne is focused on sales in King County. It could theoretically expand statewide.
But at its commission rate, the Owens will have to do brisk business, Sam said.
“We’re going to have to sell a lot of volume,” he said.
