Real Estate Commission Dispute
My question involves real estate located in the State of: ILLINOIS
I am a real estate broker, despite of written "exclusive buyer agent agreement" where the buyer guarantees the agent minimum commission of 3% of purchase price, the buyer bought the commercial property after 6 month which I showed to him, directly from the selling broker without my knowledge under the corporation name which is own by his wife.
When I confronted him and the selling broker there awnser is buyer is not the same person who signed the contract.
I feel I am the procuring cause and entitle to commission.
Can any one advise me what to do?
as you know industry is so slow I cannot afford retainer fee.:
Re: Real Estae Commission Dispute
If a commission agreement could be circumvented this easily then none of them are worth the paper they're written on.
1. Have you contacted your local professional organization's (board of Realtors?) ethics office?
2. Have you contacted your state licensing board regarding an ethics complaint?
3. How much money is involved? Small claims probably won't allow a high enough dollar limit. You can file your own complaint without a lawyer, but that is not likely to succeed. If you can't afford a lawyer you'll have to settle for threats and ethics complaint, I believe.
Re: Real Estate Commission Dispute
I'm with Bubba on this. If I signed an exclusive commission agreement, and all I have to do to get around it is to have my wife form an LLC, and buy it through the LLC, then any commission agreement I sign is totally worthless.
If the amount is large enough, you might try to see if some lawyer might go for a contingency type arrangement. If it's not that large, you might try small claims though you might be out quite a few dollars, if the commission is much larger.
You should also have an attorney review your commission agreements to see if it could be tightened up to prevent such chicanery. These agreements normally bind the signer, his agents, assigns etc., and I would bet the wif'e's LLC would fall under one of these, probably the agent or assigns.
These attempts, some clumsy, are tried all the time to circumvent commission agreements. An agent was driving me to see a property, and got into a shouting match with someone outside talking with the owner. Turned out it was a buyer the agent took to see the place the day before, and this buyer wanted to pay the seller a few bucks to run out the commission agreement, and bypass paying the commission, after it expired.