Today, we’re 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. I’ve 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.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: I’ve 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 agreement’s 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 – 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 you’re dealing with has strong moral and ethical standards or it could create nothing but trouble for you – and in the end, your site won’t 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 – and we won’t bullshit you.
First, we’ll 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 it’s worth, then we’re happy to walk away from the deal. We’ve done it many times and we’ll do it again (and again). We don’t need the business so badly that we feel compelled to compromise our professional ethics to get it.
Second, we won’t lie to you, whether you’re a seller or a buyer – about anything. Again, that’s poor ethical behavior. You’ll always get it straight from us.
Third, when you come to us initially to sell your site, we’ll be honest about the site’s marketability. If we don’t think we can sell it, then we won’t take on the listing. We’re 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 isn’t going to sell, we’ll tell you that as well. We can’t always predict the market unerringly. Sometimes we’re simply wrong — and if we are, we’ll tell you so.
The bottom line is this: When you do business with Adult Site Broker, you’ll get the straight truth from us, every step of the way. There is no BS in our approach. We’re not selling anything; we’re just helping to connect people who want to buy and sell. We’re here to provide a service and we’ve gotten very good at what we do. We are – and will always be – ethical in our approach.
We look forward to serving you.
