Buyer's Center

Asante Real Estate Group, Inc. delivers Full-Service Real Estate Brokerage services at Fair prices.

We have integrated the broad use of advanced Internet technology and the Full-Service Real Estate Agent to massively reduce the high cost of buying and selling real estate. 

Asante’s business model is identical to the Agent’s business model – your goal is to (1) drive very high volume deal-flowby (2) providing excellent Full-Service at incredibly lower prices in order to (3) capture market share and (4) drive correspondingly higher profits. 

This business model is a very similar to the WALMART, Charles Schwab or E-Trade Business Models.

Asante Real Estate Group provides the following Full-Service Real Estate Services:

1.      We sell every home for 1% - Full-Service at a Fair price. When we represent the buyer in the same transaction, then we charge just 1% for the buyer’s agent commission, instead of the 3% typically offered to other agents. This gives the seller an additional 2% of the purchase price at the close of escrow. This means that the seller saves 33% to 66% on the total commission. For a $1 million deal, the seller saves $20,000 to $40,000, and we earn a $10,000 to $20,000 commission.

2.      We developed and implemented the San Francisco Bay Area’s first structured rebate program for Buyers who find their own home. Under The Buyer Rebate Program, Buyers who find their own home get a refund of up to 50% of the buyer’s agent commission. For a $1M home, the buyer gets up to $15,000 back upon close of escrow. This has turned out to be an even bigger success than our original 1% Full-Service Listing Program.

3.      The Buyer Rebate Program delivers the full buyer’s agent service and support, except for pre-offer services – the Buyer is completely responsible for searching for his properties. Buyers may use the savings to pay closing costs, reduce the home purchase price, or get cash at close of escrow.

4.      In addition to the Buyer Rebate Program, we also represent Buyers at a flexible and negotiable rate, beginning at the full 3% offered by the listing broker. For Buyers above $2 million, some agents routinely rebate a portion of the commission even if the transaction involves a full property search. The decision is yours. Most importantly, we empower our agents to negotiate their commission in order to make sure that they capture the Buyer as a client and that the transaction still yields a reasonable profit for the Agent.

The fundamental differentiator in our business model is that we provide FULL SERVICE AT A FAIR PRICE! This is no small matter. It is a distinction with a difference. Of course, there are many Fair Price brokers out there in the world. And some of them have captured significant market share (Help-U-Sell and Assist-to-Sell, for example). Of course, the typical discount real estate broker provides proportionately less service in exchange for a relatively lower commission. We often say that Help-U-Sell will HELP YOU sell your home. Others call it Hope-U-Sell. This means that the Seller may actually end up doing some, a lot, or nearly all of the work needed to sell his home. 

At Asante, we DO NOT help you sell your home – Asante Sells Your Home…Just like Coldwell Banker, Intero or any other Full Service Broker. And, just like these other Full-Service brokers, we believe that any important activity, whether it is a real estate transaction, a significant legal action, or a serious accounting issue, requires the attention of a highly competent professional who provides a full range of professional service and care. One would be foolish to select a surgeon to perform an open-heart surgery based solely on a cheaper price. One would be wise to look first at the surgeon’s competence then, perhaps, at the cost of his services compared to the cost of other similarly qualified heart surgeons. 

While many people feel fairly comfortable dealing with their real estate transactions, the potential savings from a discounted service can be more than offset by a serious error or the agent’s inability to obtain the full fair market value for a property. In short, there really is no substitute for Full-Service Real Estate Brokerages. We always tell potential clients to never settle for less than Full-Service. And, of course, we consistently deliver Full-Service at a Fair price. 

All of this discussion highlights an ongoing business battle that occurs between the Full-Price/Full-Service real estate brokers (such as Coldwell Banker) and the Fair-Price real estate brokers, such as Help-U-Sell. The Full-Price brokers consistently use the term “Discount Broker” negatively to describe a broker who discounts his price, while he also proportionately discounts his service. This is in NOT meant as a compliment. Rather, it is a pretty effective way to discourage a potential client from using a discount broker to sell a home.

Our business model is revolutionary and much different, because we are not a “Discount Broker” in that traditional sense. Rather, Asante always provides Full-Service Real Estate Agency. We never reduce our service, because we strongly believe professional real estate agency demands a full professional commitment in order to maximize value to the client. At Asante, we ONLY Discount the Price! 

We are NOT a Full-Price Broker. We are NOT a Discount Broker. We ARE a Full-Service Broker at a Fair Price.  As you would expect, we always and consistently communicate this message (this critical difference) to potential and current clients to make sure that we brand ourselves, instead of letting the competition brand us. We also brand the competition as “Full-Price” and “Discount” – and these terms are not compliments.

Asante Real Estate offers Full-Service Real Estate Services at a Fair Price. Real Estate Buyers and Sellers love our service and pricing, but most of our competitors certainly do not. And who can blame them…we have an enormous competitive market advantage in any listing presentation, and a Buyer is definitely not getting the best deal if the find their own home and their realtor will refuse to give them a significant rebate on the commission.

Even so, experienced realtors are going to be exceptionally good at developing personal relationships with their clients so that you never get a chance to compete against them, and they are going to use every argument and every trick in the book to try to defeat your competitive market advantage. Be warned – they didn’t get to be top realtors by being weak or stupid. They will fight back.

Make sure that you create a plan that enables you to deal with objections and concerns that may have been raised by Full-Price Realtors. The starting point for selling our value propositions is that you, as the Asante Real Estate Agent, must always be a professional and provide absolute Full-Service to your clients. Otherwise, you will play into the hands of those who would like to portray Asante as a “Discount Broker”.

Our top Agents always employ some of the following objection or pre-objection techniques to offset some of these issues that may be raised by other Agents:

1.      I want to let you know that we deliver absolute Full-Service Real Estate Services. In fact, we do everything that you would get from any full-price real estate agent. The key difference, though, is that we do the job for just 1% instead of the 3% commission charged by the full-price agents.

2.      A full-price agent might say “you’ll get what you pay for.” And he is right in this case, because you will pay us 1% to list your home, and not the 3% traditionally charged by full-priced agents. We charge a fair price that is proportionate to the amount of work that we expect to perform to sell your home. It’s not worth 3% - it’s worth 1%…. and yes, you will get what you pay for.

3.      The Full-Price Agents need to get 3% commission to sell your home, because they spend most of their time looking for the next client (marketing themselves) rather than performing real estate transactions. They need to get the higher commission whenever they do sell a home in order to help compensate them for all of the time that they spend between deals, trying to sell their services. This is kind of like paying a lawyer $3,000/hour because they only bill 300 hours to clients per year. The lawyer needs to charge you the higher rate, because he does not have enough business. Now, of course that would be silly…you would never pay that exorbitant rate to the lawyer just because he can’t bill enough hours.

Likewise, you should never overpay for your real estate services because your Agent is not busy enough – because they do not do very many transactions!

Asante Real Estate Agents are always busy doing real estate transactions. Our Full-Service at Fair-Price real estate model drives a great deal more business to us, and this means that we spend very little time marketing ourselves in order to get new business.

Instead, we can focus on actually PERFORMING TRANSACTIONS for our clients. We make less money on each transaction, but we perform a lot more transactions. Most importantly, we provide a much greater value for our clients:

It is called FULL-SERVICE AT A FAIR PRICE!

The above-shown techniques are just a few of the ways to handle Buyer and Seller concerns and sell Asante’s superior value propositions. However, there are many ways to deal with objections and to sell the model. Read all of this information for the bits and pieces that make sense to you, then you can craft a message that works for you with your clients.

HOW DOES THE BUSINESS MODEL WORK?

So, how does this model work in the real world? Asante provides Full-service Agency at the FAIR PRICE listing rate of just 1% to represent the seller. Our listing agreements stipulate that the Seller pay 4% to Asante as the listing broker, from which we retain a 1% commission and pay the cooperating Buyer’s agent the standard 3% commission. This means the seller saves 2% on the total commission. For a $1 million transaction, the seller saves at least $20,000, and we earn $10,000. At the Seller’s/Agent’s prerogative, we may also represent the Buyer in the same transaction and charge a Buyer’s agent commission of just 1% instead of the 3% offered to other agents. This provides the Seller with an additional 2% on the total purchase price at the close of escrow. For that same $1 million transaction, the seller has now saved up to 4% or $40,000, and we earned a $20,000 commission.

Cost of Sale is such a critical factor, and home Sellers swiftly understand that the cost of selling his home will be a major financial consideration. He may be happy to know that the home he bought five years ago for $700,000 is now worth $1 million. But he is usually dismayed to find out that it’s going to cost him $60,000 of that $300,000 gain (20 percent of the gross gain) just to pay the real estate commissions. We save the seller $20,000 to $40,000 on that same transaction, that extra money massively increases the Seller’s profit. This makes a huge difference to the Seller and exponentially increases your probability of obtaining the property listing.

It’s essentially the same thing for Buyers. We always provide Full-Service to represent Buyers at a flexible and negotiable rate, beginning with the full 3% offered by the listing broker.   More important, we developed a Buyer’s program that empower home Buyers to locate their own home and get a refund of up to 50% of the buyer’s agent commission. For a $600K home, the buyer can get up to $9,000 back upon close of escrow. 

Now, the Agent only gets 1% of the transaction, but he also does not have to chauffer the clients around to various homes for six months. Ordinarily, the Buyer notifies the Agent that he is ready to write an offer on a specific home. The Buyer then comes to the Asante office and the Agent writes the offer. The Agent usually has invested zero time on this deal prior to the actual writing of the real estate purchase agreement.

And that is the cool thing for our Agents. They will provide absolute Full-Service beginning with the writing of the offer, but they are not required to provide any pre-offer search services. In the real-world, many of our agents set up the clients on listing alert services and serve as a real estate advisor to their clients during their searches. That is just smart business. Accordingly, these are often the most profitable transactions for our Agents, because they require a much lower investment of time and energy than listing a home or providing full home search services in the effort to get the full 3% buyer’s agent commission.

Potential Buyers are usually quick to comprehend the concept of up to 50% cash back.  This is the amount of the Buyer’s Agent commission that can either go to another Agent (for performing exactly the same work if the Buyer is able to find his own home) or the money that can go into the Buyer’s pocket. The choice and the benefit are clear – which would you choose?

As you can see, both of Asante’s Fair-Price value propositions give incredible value to the client, and Asante gets a very reasonable income in relation to our work contribution. Again, this concept of Full-Service real estate of listing homes for 1% and rebating up to 66% back to Buyers is a distinction with a difference. It is the very foundation of Asante’s revolutionary and fully disruptive business model. 

We take the buying process as seriously as our buyers do, therefore we offer nothing but the highest quality of service to our clients. We pride ourselves on the way we do business. Our core values are:

• Trust
• Experience
• Service

We'll help you understand the current condition of the market and get all the information that will quickly position you have a variety of great choices and negotiating leverage.

Here are some of the steps we will take to find your perfect home:

Determine Your Wants and Needs

This is the single most important step. By asking you a series of questions we will establish what you are looking for. My goal is to not waste your time by looking at properties that are not in your price range or homes that don't meet your needs. Throughout the buying process we will maintain your confidentiality and represent your best interests.

Help You Get Pre-Qualified

This step will show you how much you can afford.  This is accomplished by speaking with your financial institution and establishing what monthly payments you will be comfortable with. Many sellers will not proceed with an offer until they know they are dealing with someone who is pre-qualified. We'll help you get there quickly!

Finding the Right Home

We will use our powerful search programs and the latest real estate technology tools to find the properties that match your search parameters.  We can send them to you immediately via e-mail so that you can browse them at your leisure. You will also receive a personal username and password, along with your very own client section of our website. You can log in anytime you wish and view properties, make requests, or tell us if you would like schedule an appointment.  We will disclose all known facts about the property that are likely to affect your decision. When we find the home that meets your criteria, I will assist you in writing an offer and act as a liaison between you and the seller.