A Toronto based real estate firm has taken the saying "All good things come at a cost" quite literally. Dagmara Lulek and Vito Doria, agents at Royal LePage Listings are charging a $50 fee for showing a rare beach-area home, just near the Lake Ontario.
No, it is not their brokering or service charge. It is a donation that would be forwarded to a non-profit organization for children, "SickKids Foundation".
According to Yahoo News, the owners of the home chose to travel the "road not taken" in the property marketing world and decided to dodge the boring open houses and standard realtor tours. They wanted to market their home in a unique way and that is when the two realtors, proposed the idea.
The basic purpose of the marketing strategy is to keep out gawkers and attract only serious buyers. By charging potential customers, the buyer group is streamlined into a better stratum of home-buyers, filtering out the ones who just want to "take a look".
"This is somebody's home. We can't have people coming through the home just to be curious. That's not what it's about. It's about people that are in the market and people who want to see the house because they're interested in buying it," Lulek said to Yahoo.
Lulek also added that the donation fee had not dampened viewing activity of the home.
This technique has apparently garnered a lot of protests from annoyed realtors, but potential buyers have lauded the strategy, calling it 'brilliant for minimizing disruption', reports The Toronto Star. Moreover, the real estate council of Ontario also gave the technique a green signal stating that there would be no problem until the donation requirement wasn't misleading or false.
The home is located at 1 Fallingbrook Road and sits on a sprawling one acre land. Listed for around $5 million, the residence has seven bedrooms and five bathrooms and a double story guest house with a wrap-around porch. An old flight of stairs lead down to the nearby beach.
Check out the photos of the home, here.
