“The best thing about sharing food with your dog? You get to have some, too!”
Brian Brady is going to show Buyer’s Agents how to bring home the bacon by first delivering the goods, but I prize Buyer’s Agents just the way they are for their aboriginal and sine qua non function: Brokerage.
Brokerage is at its essence the introduction of buyer to seller, and Brian is correct that just that much is very easy to do without Buyer’s Agents by going to the Realty.bots. That’s how we recruit tenants for the rental homes we manage, since we don’t want Tenant’s Agents coming between us and the principals, anyway.
But we do all our own vetting on rental applicants, so a Tenant’s Agent is doing literally nothing of value to us but introducing his client to us.
Not so Buyer’s Agents. Their introductions come with elaborate qualifications – along with someone to do most of the scut work, while absorbing much of the downstream liability. In short, a Buyer’s Agent is a Sub-Agent for whom I bear no legal responsibility. I pay them 60% of the sales commission and they do 80% or more of the actual effort it takes to get to closing. I don’t hate those numbers at all – and we always pay the whole damn pizza, regardless of what I’m getting.
With a Tenant’s Agent, I’m paying for the referral and nothing else – pure brokerage – and therefore we don’t pay: I can attract thousands of semi-focused looky-loos for ten bucks a week on Zillow – and I only need one motivated, qualified party to score.
But with a Buyer’s Agent, I am temporarily onboarding a very dedicated, very focused, very highly-motivated personal assistant/transaction coordinator – for this one transaction. We’re as careful about the agents we work with as we are about the offers they bring, but the doctrine of Buyer’s Agency put their mistakes on their brokers, anyway.
I could do the work they are doing – even incurring liability as a lender as well as a dual agent – but not for free and not without friction. Every referral-fee seems brutally high – until you take on all those costs yourself. I pay Buyer’s Agents the whole damn pizza – typically half-again more than I make on a house – because they’re worth it.
Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:
Brian Brady: Buyer Agency Project: Buyer agents offer no value today.
In other news:
Victoria Taft: Eight People Shot in Downtown Portland Mass Shooting as City Gets More Dangerous by the Day.
The Washington Free Beacon: Report: Philadelphia’s Electric Bus Fleet in Complete Shambles.
American Thinker: The Biden Regime Has Made Us All Enemies of the State.
