Flat rate listings are taking the Realty world by storm. For a few hundred bucks (or nothing at all), you can put your house on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and popular sites like realtor.com. Usually, this means you’ll save 3-6% of the sales price, a tidy figure for sure.

There’s only one problem. Your house may not sell.

In many cities, agents are deliberately boycotting discount listings to keep fee-based brokers from moving in on their commissions. They also despise dealing with sellers without representation because, most of the time, they’re much more trouble.

A couple of years ago, I actually experimented with a flat rate broker, just to see if it worked. The result? Not a single phone call for about five months. Admittedly, both houses were over $1 million, so I was limiting myself to a smaller subset of the buyer’s population. Still, it was a seller’s market, and I should have received some attention. Yet, all I got was phone calls from drive-bys.

In response, I listed both of them with the hottest agents in their respective cities and had both of them sold within three months for near full price. The difference in response was huge, going from no showings to over 60.

Can flat fee listings work?

Yes… eventually. Not only will the discount market continue to grow, but I believe less and less people will use a realtor to find their house because of the amount of information available on the Internet. The old guard will eventually lose the war, and the results will pick up dramatically.

I think it can also work in exceptionally hot markets. For instance, a friend of mine was standing in line for three hours for a preconstruction deal in Sacramento yesterday. If the market is that good, then you shouldn’t have to worry about some brokers boycotting you.

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