Fulton Grace Realty Review: Is Worth It?

Overall rating | Customer experience | Agent quality | Brand visibility and reach | Service value | Locations | Methodology

Fulton Grace Realty is a full-service real estate brokerage based in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 2008, the company has five main offices staffed with over 350 agents all providing essential services to buyers and sellers in Chicagoland. Despite being a young company, Fulton Grace Realty has grown rapidly to become one of Chicago’s leading real estate brokerages.

Bottom line: Do we recommend Fulton Grace Realty?

Yes, we would recommend interviewing a Fulton Grace agent to see if they’re a good fit for your situation.

As a full-service brokerage, Fulton Grace will put your home on the MLS, as well as on its self-branded listing page, fultongrace.com. This page gets around 30,200 visits per month and can expose your listing to more Chicago buyers.

In addition to an MLS listing, the company also organizes professional photography, helps you land on the right price, and creates a marketing plan tailored for your home. They can also connect you with professionals within their network, such as appraisers, attorneys, and inspectors.

The agents at Fulton Grace can have on average more years of experience, but they get rather mediocre reviews.

It’s a solid company. But the most important thing is to choose an agent, not a brand. Be sure to interview a Fulton Grace agent thoroughly before making your decision.

Fulton Grace Realty: Our in-depth breakdown

Reputation and customer experience

Fulton Grace has a mixed bag of reviews, ranging from former sellers who were pleased with how their agent marketed their home to irate buyers who never got a call back. The brokerage has a 3.8 rating on Google (with 197 reviews) — slightly below average compared with other regional companies.

To dig deeper, we ran these reviews through a program that identifies emotional language:

Many of the reviews (especially the negative ones) were aimed at Fulton Grace’s rental properties and property management services. These reviewers include former renters who had a dispute with the company, and landlords who were dissatisfied with how Fulton Grace handled their rental.

It’s also important to remember that people will use third-party review sites to voice complaints more frequently than praise. That doesn’t mean the complaints are false, but it could mean the complaints are longer and more detailed, simply because the reviewer has more motivation to write.

On its Better Business Bureau profile, Fulton Grace has one complaint and an A+ rating based on four reviews.

Agent quality

The agent team at Fulton Grace Realty appears strong. The average number of years working as a realtor is 16 years — double the industry median. We always recommend interviewing individual agents. Ask how long they’ve been a realtor and what differentiates them from other agents in Chicago.

Brand reach and visibility

Fulton Grace Realty’s brand power is excellent compared with other brokerages in Chicago, like Baird & Warner.

Its market coverage is exceptionally strong, with six offices across the Northside of Chicago, and 350 agents representing over 7,500 active listings in the city limits. There are also about 23,000 active listings spanning Illinois: Bloomington, Champaign, Decatur, Galena, Gurnee, and Naperville.

According to our analytics tool, more than 11,000 people search "fulton grace realty" and other branded terms online each month, while the website gets roughly 30,200 visits. That’s much higher than what we’ve seen for regional brokerages of the same size.

Service value

Like other full-service brokerages, Fulton Grace agents help buyers find listings, get pre-approved for mortgages, tour properties, and negotiate the best price.

Fulton Grace Realty gives sellers the services they need to sell their home. These include:

• MLS listing and syndication across major real estate sites
• Strategic pricing and CMA
• Professional photography and home staging
• Marketing materials, including sale signs, brochures, flyers
• Social media and email marketing
• Open house planning and coordination

Agents from Fulton Grace Realty will likely charge fixed commission for their services, in spite of what local competitive rates are. For a point of comparison, here are the averages for Illinois:

The company doesn’t appear to offer sellers virtual tours or aerial photography. While these aren’t essential, they can be nice add-ons — especially if you’re paying full price to work with a Fulton Grace agent.

» MORE: Average Commission Rates Across the U.S.

Additional info about Fulton Grace Realty

General contact info (corporate office)

Fulton Grace Realty local offices and contact information

Other Fulton Grace Realty services

For this review, we focused primarily on Fulton Grace Realty’s real estate agent services. In addition to these, Fulton Grace also operates a large property management business. If you’re interested in property management, we recommend shopping around for the best fit and value before deciding on Fulton Grace.

Next steps: Start interviewing agents!

Interview multiple agents (ideally two to three) to ensure you get the best fit and value. Remember: always hire the agent, not the brand. When you’re ready to start searching, check out our guide on how to choose the right real estate agent. Clever’s free agent-matching service makes agent shopping fast and easy, and it can save you money.

Rating methodology

We evaluate brokerages based on four core criteria we think will help readers make informed decisions. We broke those criteria down into discrete metrics so we could make the score as objective as possible. Here’s a quick breakdown of that criteria and methodology: