Creating Community Realty

As nonprofit enterprises go, this one aimed to be strongly focused on its mission. “We didn’t want it to be a glorified bake sale,” says Eric Dahl, hired as staff for the collaborative of housing groups that founded the brokerage. But the collaborative members certainly didn’t want to create a new entity that would turn around and compete with them for funding either.

The brokerage, which the collaborative named Community Realty, fit in both respects. It could be 100 percent mission, but it could also earn money as any other brokerage does, without taking money out of its clients’ pockets. Community Realty earns “cooperative broker fees” with each closing, which are a portion of the commission that the seller has agreed to pay their own agent. In the rare cases of owners who sell their homes directly without a broker, Community Realty will attempt to negotiate a buyer’s agent fee into the purchase price. The business plan calls for the brokerage to break even in five years.