SELLER BEWARE: Listing agent report cards expose veteran dual agents

Insert Veteran Dual Agent image

Yesterday we blogged from the buyers’ side of the transaction, today it’s the sellers’.

Yesterday we blogged from the buyers’ side of the transaction, today it’s the sellers’.  It’s biblical wisdom, you can’t serve two masters but that’s not what the real estate industry wants you to believe.  In 1993, the industry went state to state changing laws to paper over conflicts of interest. Twenty years later, dual agency practitioners and consumer advocatesare still fighting this “holy war.”

Beneath their war of words, “broker babble” if you’re a home buyer or seller, is a simple question:

Who’s on my side, and what’s the bottomline?

Since agents routinely ignore state laws which require them to disclose their agency relationship, The Real Estate Cafe has been providing readers something stronger than a disclosure — a Pledge of Allegiance they can use to protect themselves from being betrayed.

Yesterday, Redfin released some original research and concluded that dual agency hurts sellers more than buyers.  While some question the interpretation of their data, macro statistics can’t help you make side-by-side comparisons of listing agents, and decide who is best qualified, based on actual performance in the MLS, to sell your home.  That’s the goal of our Listing Agent Report Card!

Exposing agents with a history of conflicts of interest, both dual agency and designated agency, is just one of the many decision making criteria that we analyze; and since we don’t take listings, we don’t have a conflict of interest.

The Spring housing market is just around the corner, so if you’re searching for the best real estate agents to list your property (or RELIST your home if one of the 20,000+ homeownerswho’s listings expired or were canceled across MA during 4Q2011), we’d love to show you sample listing agent report cards BEFORE you begin interviewing agents and explain how ourreferral rebate works.

If you don’t need a full report card, our Dual Agency Detective simply do a snap shot to identify whether agents you’d like to interview have a history of conflict of interest.  Our goal is to protect you from being betrayed like this seller who commented on our previous blog post:  Dual agency detective exposes love & betrayal in luxury home market

I am a Seller. My listing agent was contacted by a “drive by” in regards to my home. The drive by has now turned into the Buyer and this is now a Dual Agency situation.

The offer was emailed to me from my Real Estate Agent and said quote ” the buyer was coming in much lower but I coached him to your minimum price.” The offer came in at my very lowest acceptable price.

Related Articles

Edit for publication

If the NJ bubble blog post is correct and listing agents are being rewarded for getting sellers to drop their asking prices, industry regulators should begin asking serious questions about conflicts of interest and breaches of fiduciary duty. Isn’t the listing agent’s legal obligation to get the highest price for the seller? Wonder if the dual agency or designated agency — a form of brokerage where a single agency tries to represent both buyers and sellers — could be at work behind this anecdote. If so, my guess is that industry critics and a few class action lawyers will be watching this trends closely.

The authors of _Freakonomics_, or some other economists should also take note of this trends, and take a look at a trend we saw last year in Boston. Some sellers would rather drop their agents than drop their price, or more specifically their net profit after paying real estate commissions. If they can drop their price by the amount of the commission, why not say goodbye to the listing agent and their newest conflict of interest?

Responses

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

HTML Snippets Powered By : XYZScripts.com