Welcome to 4 Sale Realty, Inc.

The New Illinois Law

Recently (in 2004) former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich signed a new law pertaining to real estate. The bill was railroaded through the system without fanfare and now affects everyone reading this email. It became effective immediately.

The new law applies to any person that has a listing agreement with a Realtor. Yes, that even covers the Flat Fee Listing Agreement. With the new law, your Realtor (me), must provide at a minimum three things and they all pertain to the negotiating of the deal with the buyers. 1) I must answer any and all questions you may have. 2) I must accept any offers or counter-offers pertaining to your property. 3) I must assist you in every way in negotiating a deal with your buyer.

To paraphrase, for each and every one of you, I am required to offer you my help to negotiate the sale of your house.

I did not write the law. This law was created by the big companies in an effort to make these flat fee deals too time consuming for small companies such as mine. They claim it is in the better interest of the seller. But, to be honest, the sellers are doing just fine and this is really an attempt to force all brokers into a more traditional full service type business model. Personally, I think it borders on anti-trust violations and violates your right to free choice and my right to charge whatever I wish for my services. In a free market society, market conditions should set the price for goods and services and not the government or its lobbyist.

In compliance with the new law, let me say right now that if you are reading this and have a listing with my company, you are welcome to use me to negotiate your deal. Period.

So, if a Realtor asks you where do they present the offer, you can now say, fax it to my agent. My fax number is (847) 986-3520. When an offer is faxed to me it will automatically go to my email as a PDF. I will review the offer and then forward it to you with a summary of the offer. Then, I will call you to go over the details of the offer and will work with you to come up with a negotiating strategy to get you the price you want relative to the offer on the table.

I did take counsel with an attorney and he said that it appears as if the intent of this law is aimed at stopping this flat fee program. He also said that even though I am offering (providing) this service, the government can not force you to use the service. So, I believe you can refuse my offer, or you are welcome to use it. As far as I can tell, it is your choice. However, the State of Illinois disagrees with that position. They say that the service can not be waived. It has not been challenged in court yet.

Understand that I will not charge you anything for the additional work. I feel that you did not create the law nor did you expect it when you signed up for the service so I do not feel right in charging extra for the service. I will, however, take a negotiating compliance fee of $200.00 from the commission of the buyers Realtor as I feel it was at insistence of the big companies that the law was passed.

For what it is worth, this bill started in the minds of the Illinois Association of Realtors and the heads of some large brokerage firms. If you are interested, the following State Senators: Tony Munoz and Martin Sandoval and the following State Representatives: "Skip" Saviano, Dan Reitz, Rich Bradley, Kurt Granberg, Michael McAuliffe, Steve Davis, Beth Coulson, Dan Burke, Eileen Lyons, and Patrick Vershoore sponsored this legislation (some, are no longer active in service). If you like this law, thank them. If you think they are forcing you to use a service that you don't want, let them know.