May 20, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Canadian real-estate broker has started a new organization, Charity Begins With Your Home,
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to help people make gifts to charity when they sell or buy a home.
The new organization is based on the practice of obtaining “referral commissions,” which are earned when one real-estate agent recommends another to help a client buy or sell property. The second agent pays part of the commission to the agent that referred the client.
Charity Begins With Your Home helps charities by acting as the referring agent and turning over 75 per cent of the referral commission to a charity selected by the person selling their home. The company keeps the remaining 25 per cent to cover expenses such as telephone, postage, and printing costs.
For instance, if a donor’s home sold for $150,000, the donation from the commission would be $843, and the donor could take a charitable tax deduction for that amount.
To participate, donors must contact the organization, which is based in Kincardine, Canada, before listing a property for sale or obtaining a broker to help them buy property.
In creating his new company last year, founder Sam Finnie got approval from Revenue Canada, the Canadian equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, to allow donors to claim charitable deductions through the referral program. So far, Canadian donors have made more than $6,000 worth of gifts through the new company.
Most of the gifts so far, notes Mr. Finnie, have come from donors who have read news stories about his program and contacted him independently. Non-profit groups, he says, could increase gifts they receive through the program if they sent donors special mailings or other communications to explain how they could make gifts through property transactions.
Mr. Finnie says that he is seeking to gain charity status for Charity Begins With Your Home in Canada.
Although he has yet to handle a donated commission from the United States, he is working to expand his efforts in the U.S. To that end, he says, he has consulted officials from the National Society of Fund Raising Executives and associations of realtors.
For more information, contact Sam Finnie, Executive Director, Charity Begins With Your Home, 312 Durham Market Square, Kincardine, Ontario, Canada N2Z 2A2; (888) 461-2001; e-mail: giftprog@magma.ca; Web site: http://www.charitybegins.com.
