Dual Agency

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Prudence
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Joined: Fri Mar 09, 2012 3:55 pm

Dual Agency

Post by Prudence »

We are selling our house in Maryland. In the listing agreement, we can accept or decline dual agency. When we questioned this, our realtor (who is an old friend we trust) said we would be hurting ourselves if we decline. Her firm is one of the largest in the area and has hundreds, maybe thousands of agents. She says that these other agents will have no incentive to show the house to their clients without dual agency, so it shrinks the market. If a potential buyer has no agent, our agent (she said) is permitted to exercise a "ministerial" function and write an offer dictated by the buyer and is not permitted to do anything except act as a scribe. We don't like dual agency because of the conflict of interest. OTOH, we are in a hot sellers market and expect to receive strong interest and many offers. I feel that the market will reveal the best deal and the conflict of interest should not materially affect our bargaining power. Please comment if you have any experience with this.
stan1
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Re: Dual Agency

Post by stan1 »

Dual agency can refer to an agency or a specific agent. If an agency has hundreds of agents in your area I think it would be a huge disadvantage to exclude them. Having the same agent represent buyer and seller poses more conflicts of interest, but as a motivated seller in a seller's market I don't think you'd need to be too worried about that in most cases.
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RickBoglehead
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Re: Dual Agency

Post by RickBoglehead »

If you convey confidential information to your agent, and that agent conveys that information to other agents in his/her firm, such as "we'd take $XXX" or "we need to sell by $YYY", then their violating their duties regardless. I would accept dual agency.

Probably too late, but in this market one should consider FSBO. We sold a property last year FSBO because we wanted to limit people from entering the premises due to Covid-19, and agents wouldn't do anything but hang a lockbox and ask people to wear masks. We are very confident that what we accepted was more than our net proceeds would have been.

We may be selling our primary residence this year. Given the hot market, and the hope that vaccination rates will keep climbing, we may go FSBO again.

Note - we did utilize a real estate attorney in our sale last year, total cost under $1,000. With that knowledge, we could keep the cost on a property in the same state 1/2 of that in a future deal.
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BogleTaxPro
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Joined: Sat Apr 04, 2020 6:08 pm

Re: Dual Agency

Post by BogleTaxPro »

stan1 wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 10:21 am Dual agency can refer to an agency or a specific agent. If an agency has hundreds of agents in your area I think it would be a huge disadvantage to exclude them. Having the same agent represent buyer and seller poses more conflicts of interest, but as a motivated seller in a seller's market I don't think you'd need to be too worried about that in most cases.
+1 this. We had a dual agency situation when we bought our current house/sold our previous house...and when a problem cropped up that could have torpedoed the sale the agents were 'highly motivated' to help sort it out in order to make both transactions happen. Trust your friend and don't exclude a bunch of potential buyers.
Swivelguy
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Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:37 pm

Re: Dual Agency

Post by Swivelguy »

The buyer's agent should be listed on any offers you receive. So if you get comparable offers from a dual-agent buyer and a non-dual-agent buyer, you can choose to use that as a criterion for deciding between offers.
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