February 17, 2022 |
Ethics in Website Brokering |
Today, weâre going to take a break from our series on buying and selling websites and focus on an important subject for how people decide who should broker your website: Ethics. Ethics and honesty are everything in business. Iâve always strictly followed a professional code of ethics and I run Adult Site Broker the same way. A code of ethics sets forth principles designed to govern our decision-making and distinguish right from wrong. Unfortunately, not everyone in our industry has such a code of ethics or sticks to it if they do. Some companies will do or say anything to get and keep a deal. Hereâs an example of what Iâm talking about: Iâve been approached about one company which, on more than one occasion, has taken on a listing and when their agreement is about to expire, suddenly a buyer appears. Much haggling happens back and forth, taking the seller well beyond the date of the expiration of the agreement. But since pretty much all broker agreements say that any interested buyers belong to the broker past the point of an agreementâs expiration date, the seller is forced to continue to work with the broker. Plus, the poor seller wants to sell his website, so he goes along with things in hopes that things with interested buyer eventually pans out. In the end, the buyer turns out to be fictitious â and in at least one case, the fake buyer was the broker himself and the deal in the end never came to pass. Now, I could comment on how this type of conduct is totally inappropriate, a conflict of interest and borderline illegal, but I think you get the idea here. Again: ethics is everything! When selling your site through a third party, make sure the broker youâre dealing with has strong moral and ethical standards or it could create nothing but trouble for you â and in the end, your site wonât get sold anyway. One thing you can be assured of when you deal with Adult Site Broker: We will do our utmost to sell your site â and we wonât bullshit you. First, weâll give you a fair valuation, not simply tell you what you want to hear about the value of your site. Some other brokers will do anything to get a deal, including inflating the price of a property. Since an overpriced property is likely to cause your site not to sell, we will never do that at Adult Site Broker. We have years of experience valuating sites and are very good at coming up with a price that will help your site get sold. If a seller wants more for their site than we believe itâs worth, then weâre happy to walk away from the deal. Weâve done it many times and weâll do it again (and again). We donât need the business so badly that we feel compelled to compromise our professional ethics to get it. Second, we wonât lie to you, whether youâre a seller or a buyer â about anything. Again, thatâs poor ethical behavior. Youâll always get it straight from us. Third, when you come to us initially to sell your site, weâll be honest about the siteâs marketability. If we donât think we can sell it, then we wonât take on the listing. Weâre not so anxious for listings that we need to fill ours up with less desirable properties just to create an impression. Finally, if after taking on a listing we see that a site isnât going to sell, weâll tell you that as well. We canât always predict the market unerringly. Sometimes weâre simply wrong — and if we are, weâll tell you so. The bottom line is this: When you do business with Adult Site Broker, youâll get the straight truth from us, every step of the way. There is no BS in our approach. Weâre not selling anything; weâre just helping to connect people who want to buy and sell. Weâre here to provide a service and weâve gotten very good at what we do. We are â and will always be â ethical in our approach. We look forward to serving you. |