Who We Are

ARAMANÉ: Kannada word for ‘Palace’.

Hi, I am a first generation immigrant from India. When I first arrived in Atlanta in 2010 for grad school, I had no idea where life would take me. In the time since, I have built a life, a community and met the love of my life here. Now, Atlanta is home.

When I bought my first home in 2017, I had no idea how the home buying process worked let alone how buyer’s agent commissions worked. All I was told was ‘seller pays commission’, so you don’t have to pay ANY COMMISSIONS as a buyer. I was stoked! A free agent? Imagine my free-stuff loving immigrant heart jumping with joy.

By the time it was time to buy my next home, I had heard rumors and passing mentions of buyer’s agent rebates. So I set out to find one such agent. This search and helping friends in their home buying processes taught me two facts:

  1. Buyers (especially first time buyers) generally have no idea that they could get rebates from their agent

  2. Buyer agents that give rebates are fairly rare and hard to find

Here’s how buyer‘s agent rebates work:

  1. Assume you are buying a property for $500,000

  2. Assume the buyer’s agent’s share of the commission is ~3% which equals nearly $15,000.

  3. This made sense in the olden pre-historic times. Agents did the hard work of connecting buyers to sellers.

Here’s the kicker:

  1. With the advent of the internet and websites like Zillow, Realtor and RedFin, home buyers can and are doing much of the hard work and research upfront. So much data is now available with just a few clicks.

  2. There is no reason that the buyer’s agent can’t share some of (or a large chunk of) the ~$15000 commission they get with customers that are doing a ton of research up front.

Here’s a kicker to the kicker:

  1. Can you walk into the sales office of a new construction community and sign an agreement for a new home without a buyer’s agent? Yes, absolutely you can.

  2. However, if you put down your buyer’s agent’s name as the introducing agent during your first visit, your buyer’s agent can get the buyer’s agent commission and give you rebates at the time of closing.

  3. In today’s residential housing market, those are invaluable dollars you would otherwise be leaving on the table instead of using them to buy down your rates or pay towards your HOA dues etc.