Auction.com wooing commercial brokers with $5,000

As part of its expansion efforts, Auction.com is trying to woo commercial brokers with a hybrid model fuses traditional brokerage with its bidding service. To help kickstart these relationships, Auction.com is offering brokers $5,000 for listing one of their properties on the site.

The service’s early years largely relied on foreclosed real estate listings, but the service has been pushing to represent more owners of residential and commercial listings.

Most of the Auction.com’s sales are residential, so the company is hoping to beef up its commercial business by convincing brokers that listing their properties will actually widen the pool of possible buyers exposed to their listings, the Wall Street Journal reported.

This may include more foreign buyers. Earlier this year, Auction.com announced a venture with Shanghai-based Juwai.com to market U.S. homes to Chinese buyers.

The service still needs to sort out how to divide commissions with the brokers. Many brokers who have sold properties through Auction.com, up until now, have accepted smaller cuts. Auction.com is mulling a change to its commission structure so that this isn’t the case, the newspaper reported. For the moment, brokers can collect the $5,000 listing bonus and a $10,000 additional bonus when the properties sell.

Auction.com says it will likely sell up to 1,500 commercial properties this year and 50,000-60,000 homes. [WSJ] — Kathryn Brenzel