We are a full service real estate brokerage and agency.
Our services are provided by licensed attorneys who are also licensed real estate agents.
We offer a combination of legal and real estate agent service to our clients wrapped up in one – a licensed attorney agent will step in and sell your home for a fraction of the commission of a traditional agency. Our fees are capped at a 1% commission rate – no additional legal fees. We’re specialists with many years of experience in both law and real estate, which means we can do the same work much more efficiently and with significantly mitigated legal risk. Your equity belongs to you, and we keep your risk of lawsuit or contract breaches much lower by guiding you through your transaction, advising you of your rights and obligations at every step of the way.
Because we can practice law, we can offer much more support and guidance, and protect your transaction from day one. Selling a home is a big event, and unfortunately, many will try to take advantage along the way, which is why we do what we do. After many years of litigating after the damage was already done, we decided to open a brokerage to help people stave off the problems before they had a chance to occur.
Some of the ways we make big impacts:
- Preventing the other party from taking advantage of repair requests and demanding items be fixed that are outside the contract.
- Presenting invalid CL-100 forms and repair requests.
- Protecting you from demands of price reduction, credits, and threats by buyers to walk away from the deal for no reason.
- Guilding you when the other party fails to perform some part of the contract, and perhaps they try to get you to sign an extension, which you may be unaware reinstates all their rights and leverage against you.
- Prevention from sudden changes to finance types late in the transaction that may have serious impacts on the rights and obligations of the seller.
- Working with contracts that have defaulted to as-is status due to a breach or failure to act (this usually becomes messy with pushback and we make sure the risk stays as mitigated as possible)
- The use of nepotism in repair work and hired vendors – when other party agents try to use non-independent businesses or parties to provide prices, estimates, or other material input on your transaction.
- Protection from other real estate agents who (very commonly) violate the unauthorized practice of law regulations by writing in contract language or attempt to dictate what your rights and obligations are under the contract.
- Preventing and contesting invalid or unethical (or even fraudulent) appraisals.
- Working with state/county agencies for things like new plat / TMS numbers for divided parcels when buying vacant land.
- Filing actions for partition if the sale involves multiple parties and not all want to sell.
- Working with probate property, property involved in divorce, etc.
We still offer all of the great things about a real estate agency – knowledge of the local market, comparative analysis and price point suggestions, full marketing, and listing on the MLS and social media outlets. We just add on the massive benefit of having a lawyer guide and protect you through the entire process, because it is fast moving and can be very complicated if you do not know what legal impacts may come from certain words or signing certain documents – sometimes the things you do “just to be nice” can cost you many thousands of dollars or land you in hot water because you did not know at the time.
We’ve sold hundreds of homes in multiple states and have seen it all – it’s allowed us to refine the process and pass on the savings. We feel traditional commissions are very inflated and unfair. which is now being reflected in US courts with major lawsuits attacking the over-inflated traditional real estate fees, and when considering the amount of litigation coming our way over real estate transactions – this is how we help our community fight both sides of that coin.
The five most litigated areas of a real estate transaction are:
- breach of contract,
- failure to disclose defects (including undisclosed use of unlicensed contractors on the seller’s disclosures),
- real estate agents breaches of fiduciary duties,
- boundary disputes, and
- specific performance or claim for other contractual monetary damages.
While you can never guarantee everything will be perfect, the truth is that using a lawyer agent will GREATLY reduce the risk of running into these and can make sure you are as compliant as possible to avoid these huge pitfalls.
Got questions? Let us know. Local to James Island, serving James, John’s, and Folly Island (and nearby as needed and available).