THOUGHTS ON SHOWING FEES

Plenty of families loaded up their steel wagons and fled the big cities during the pandemic. Remote work made it possible to live hours from the office. Large numbers of those people wound up in Kingston.  I have it on decent authority that an agent from Toronto drove a packed minivan up twice a month and sold unbuilt west-end homes to his investor-clients.

Other big city agents, though, just sent their clients up with the instruction, “Call me if you see something great and we’ll submit an offer.”

Reception here to that tactic was mixed. Toronto agents don’t generally have much of a clue about our local market and the offers were sometimes stupidly inflated. Good for sellers, but not so much for local buyers who saw the data getting skewed, and affordable houses harder to find.

Agents here, including me, were generally miffed at having shown their listings to out-of-town buyers who appeared again days later with an agent of their own. They felt deceived and used. They’d exposed themselves to all that Covid-thick Toronto air, and for what?

The answer for some of them was to introduce “Showing Fees” and to put a note on the listing, something along the lines of  “A SHOWING FEE OF …% OF THE SELLING SIDE COMMISSION (PLUS HST) WILL BE WITHHELD BY THE LISTING BROKERAGE IF THEY INTRODUCE/SHOW CO-OPERATING BROKERAGE'S EVENTUAL BUYER, BUYER'S SPOUSE, PARTNER OR IMMEDIATE FAMILY MEMBER TO THE PROPERTY THROUGH A PRIVATE SHOWING.” The percentage charged was usually between 25% and 50%.

I think it was a reasonable move. The risks felt real. Danger pay, was what it felt like.

But times have changed. Showings are rarely fatal. And most Toronto agents know better than to spend six hours on the 401 in a cool market. The need for those showing fees vanished along with all the out-of-town traffic, and most agents did away with them.

Most, but not all. And that’s a desperate shame. I think sellers these days should be wary of signing off on that provision in the listing paperwork. Here’s why.

Buyers don’t always hook up with a realtor before embarking on their house search. They call listing agents for the first few viewings, and that way they find out who they like and don’t like, who they think best understands their search and will best protect their interests. This makes really good sense to me. Agents should have to work for a buyer’s business.

But a few weeks back, a buyer I’d talked to, and shown through downtown property, asked me to write an offer for him on a house that he’d looked at with another agent. This was in the neighbourhood I work in most often, and the property was one I’d sold just a few years ago, after it was renovated. I was a very good fit for the job. That property, though, had a showing fee mentioned in the listing. Which meant 50% of the buying agent’s commission would be kept by the listing agent. They’d make another $6000 for an hour’s work, tops.

Here are my questions:

Shouldn’t we as agents understand and respect that some unrepresented buyers will undoubtedly want to see our listings, and if they return with an offer, whoever writes it, we should be mighty pleased, and see that as part of a job well-done, rather than as an opportunity to seriously increase our commission?

Faced with this showing fee declaration in a listing, won’t freshly hired buyer agents be tempted to steer buyers to other properties instead?

The bottom line is that agreeing to a showing fee in the listing paperwork is almost never in a seller’s best interests. It may well drive away prospective buyers. Put another way: it is a terrible move.

Do sellers even realize what they’re signing, I wonder? Do they register that the agent they are about to hire is asking that they be able to keep an extra 25% to 50% of the total commission, just for showing the property to someone who may end up working with someone else? How exactly, in this safe-ish real estate scene almost entirely free of out-of-town agents, does the listing agent justify such a provision?

The legal argument for persisting with the clause (I have discovered in researching this bit) is that that the first showing can be considered a “procuring cause” for the house sale, and the listing agent sits at the head of an unbroken chain of events leading to a firm deal.

It’s a ludicrous claim. The buyer decided that they preferred other representation. For whatever reason, they decided the listing agent wouldn’t serve them well. And the agent actually hired is the one who wrote the offer, negotiated terms, organized inspections and waivers etc. Their workload, and importance to the process, far outstrips the listing agent’s, who merely opened a door, or even just answered their phone.

I can feel my temperature rising. The tactic is mostly a cash grab, and one that may well further diminish the public’s trust in the real estate industry. I would argue that except when it can be shown that a buyer agent who pops up with an offer without having shown the house did so wilfully, intending to deceive, showing fees shouldn’t be allowed. And furthermore, if your agent wants to be paid several grand extra, just for showing your house once, to someone who ends up working with another agent, you’ve picked the wrong agent.

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This Is Getting Old

Yesterday I visited, sort of, my dad at the assisted living facility next to the McDonald’s and across from the mall in Kingston’s west end. He often insists that I should rescue him, get him “the hell away from this place” and take him “home”. But recently I drove him past the Amherstview house where he lived for nearly forty-five years, until 2024 when my mother died and his living alone was unsafe, and he shows no sign of recognizing that house. Dementia wraps him up a little tighter every day.

I don’t care much for my dad. His recent mild, mostly polite, and sometimes even grateful costume, is unfamiliar to me, and I bristle when he puts it on. I’d rather he prove, for the duration of this bleach- and sick-scented end-game, that he’s still the same nasty, self-centred man I know so well. It’s just easier that way.

I’m not sure he recognized me immediately yesterday. I could see that he has to rifle through a collection of names. It was if a cop had marched me in front of him: Is this the man? He decided eventually, Yes, that’s him, and we began again.

I checked the state of his room and then watched him eat from the hallway outside the dining room. He’d already forgotten I was there. The food here is awful and he struggled with it, then looked for an age at his hands in his lap, turning them this way and that, like something he was considering at a garage sale. When he got to his feet a staff member eased him into a wheelchair and backed him through the doorway to the shaded outdoor patio that gives onto the suburbs and, in the distance, the scarlet sign for the fish and chip shop.

I drove downtown and bought myself lunch at Saigon Delights. I sat near the window, where the wi-fi is stronger. A delivery truck pulled up and the driver loaded a cart with waxed boxes of bok chow, a flat of pale bean sprouts. He hauled it up the steps backwards and through the door. The routine, the technique, was exactly what I had seen them do with my dad an hour earlier. There is, I realized ruefully and for the umpteenth time, no getting away from him.

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I first walked these 98 acres with the seller back in the fall of 2025 and haven’t stopped thinking about them since. I clambered down to the shoreline other side of the road, dug shards of pottery from the cliff, stared south (a little sadly) towards America. Afterwards I walked to the pond near the back of the land and marvelled at the variety of landscapes I’d moved through. There was something surreal about the experience, as if I was as likely to run into cheetah or hyena as I was tweed-clad birder. I could breathe better, and think more clearly. I wanted to both laugh and cry, sleep and run.

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