Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Bhunt,

I would say that we are living, all of us, in a competetive lanscape, irrespective of the fact that we might not like it.IMHO, for as long as the rules are fair&clear for all of your customers or customers to be it's ok.Otherwise you would end up offering your services to one very narrow group of clients.How they can actually use your services and what profits they can derive from it is totally dependent on how creative they are and how well they are able to identify their target group's needs, make their offering consistent with those needs and then deliver on their promise they make to their customers.

Regards

Adam

A conflict of interest is if you are tied financially to the success of group A and then represent group B in negotiations with group A. You could benefit by doing a bad job of representing group B. Even if you have great integrity and don't do this - it is still a conflict of interest because you could be tempted or even unconciously do a bad deal because you would benefit by it.

In your case, you are not taking a side. You are offering a service to either or both competitors. If you have proprietary information from either or both parties that would help the other against their competitior, you have to be careful not to divulge this or inadvertently use it in your services offered to the competitor. If you did, you would violate a trust at the least, if you signed no non-disclosure agreements, or at worst, violate a non-disclosure agreement.

I believe your last statement is the best: You offer the tools. Both parties use them based on doing their homework.

Of course, you can "brand" yourself out of a niche - if you called yourself Realty Multimedia and used a tag line of "We provide multimedia services for you to compete against home builders" and included a bunch of real estate testimonials in your advertising where the real estate brokers told of how you helped them grind home builders to the ground, you would lose a segment of your sales.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

Conflicts of interest are often determined by the customer. If a realtor doesn't have a problem with you representing a homebuilder....there's no confict.

In some sense you don't want to work with more than 1 realtor in a geographic area, but if someone says they're "specialists" in all of california real estate they're stretching the truth.....unless they have offices all over the state.

Hope this helps

Michael