Saturday, August 07, 2010

Marketing flyers

Read this letter.

My view
I receive several marketing flyers every day from property agents trying to sell properties that I am not interested in or asking me to sell my property, which I am also not interested in. I throw away these marketing flyers without looking at them. I also ignore the flyers on new property launches of residential, commercial and industrial estates.

It is so wasteful to be spending so much money on marketing materials that go into the waste basket. The people who make money are the printers and the distributors of the materials. The property agents do not mind wasting this money, because they can make a big killing when the close a transaction, i.e. a few thousand dollars or tens of thousand. They only need to close one transaction every few months to earn a living.

Another wasteful practice is the marketing flyers sent by banks with their monthly statements and credit card statements.

Why is Singapore so wasteful? Why should the public pay so much in commission to the property agent? This inefficiency and wastefulness adds to the cost of living and the cost of doing business.

Tan Kin Lian
Posted by at

4 comments:

Parka said...

Commission is one of the hidden cost in the high pricing of units.

It's a problem, and there's definitely a huge business opportunity here -- to weed out all these middle men.

August 07, 2010 11:36 AM
Yee Seng said...

SG property agents' commission is not high, really. US home sellers has to pay 5-7% commission to the property agent.

I'm not a property agent nor in the property line.

August 08, 2010 12:51 AM
Francis said...

We must have more friendly environmental marketing campaign and more web base paperless to be promoted. Can be part of the code of ethnics of the property agent as well as other distribution channel i.e insurance etc

August 08, 2010 10:40 AM
Bloom said...

Yee Seng, the agents in the US gets a 5-6 percent commission because of various reasons: To obtain a license to market a property, they need to sit through a vigorous exam (which is very much unlike the S'pore one). Every year, they are required to go through their CPE (Continuous Professional Education) which requires a couple of hours of training to get up to the date in changes in the law and practice. When they market a property they are expected by the seller to offer advice on how to spruce up a home before the Open House is staged. As the US is a litigious society, the agents must have a very good grasp of the legal contracts involved. I have sold my property in Singapore and I also have the experience of buying a home in the U.S. and I definitely say there are justifications for a higher commission in the U.S

August 11, 2010 3:27 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Blog Archive