Does Your Agent Work For You? Are You Sure?

Once upon a time when you worked with a real estate agent to purchase a home, you assumed the agent you were working with was working for you. This assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth. In reality they were also working for the Sellers. But things have changed.

Today, agents are required to notify you IN WRITING who they are working for. If they are working for the Seller, they are required to disclose that to you. If you “hire” them to represent you then VA state law 54.1-2137 requires that the brokerage relationship be put in writing. The agreement must contain the following:

A definite termination date
State the amount of the brokerage fees and how and when such fees are to be paid
State the services to be rendered by the licensee
Include other terms agreed to by the client and the licensee
Whether there is dual or designated representation (to be discussed in a later post)

Even if you sign a Buyer Broker Agreement, there could be a question if your agent is really working for you.

Agents don’t get paid until the deal closes and if it never closes they never get paid for all the time and energy spent. Therefore, they are motivated to get you under contract and closed quickly. The questions you should ask yourself, and your agent if necessary:

Are they willing to tell you to walk away from a deal?
Are your best interests at the center of their efforts?
Are they knowledgeable about the type of property in which you are interested?
Are they completely honest with you about the negotiations? The offers?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no” then you need to think twice about your representation.

How to tell if an agent is willing to tell you to walk away from a deal.

If you have written a contract on a property and the home inspection shows a significant problem the seller is not willing to permanently fix to your satisfaction, will you agent encourage you to walk away? I am.

I had clients who learned during a home inspection the house had significant dampness in the crawl space. Failure to rectify this dampness could lead to rotting floor joists, sill plates and band boards…basically everything wooden holding up the house.

We wrote the request for repairs that the dampness problem be permanently corrected. The seller balked at the word “permanently”. It took me several days to convince the Buyers to walk away from the deal. Why should they walk? Because if the problem could not be corrected permanently then when they wished to sell, they would run into the same problem and be saddled with the cost correcting the moisture problem or not being able to sell the home.

The Buyers researched the location of the property, at my encouragement, and discovered the house was built in a dry creek bed with an underground spring. That property would never be dry.

The Buyers walked away from the deal and we located a much nicer home on a high piece of land with no structural, or potential structural issues. Would your agent do that?