Recently I looked at offers on one of my listings. Prior to offer day I was calling all the Realtors who had requested disclosures to get a sense of how many offers we could be expecting. It was a good exercise not only for the purposes of a preliminary feel for offer day, but also to get some final feedback on the houses. I spoke at length with each Realtor about their buyers’ situations, and their expectations in terms of price and property condition. One of the Realtors thanked me for meeting her client the house.
“Wait a minute,” I said in confusion, “I thought that was another Realtor’s client. In fact, the other Realtor came out to the house while I was there!” It turned out the Realtor I was calling had recently learned her buyer was working with the other agent, and she was cutting off their working relationship. They were actually friends too, and their friendship would stay intact, but she wasn’t going to spend her time trying to help her friend if her friend was going to turn around and work with someone else.
It gets worse for the Realtors. Each had spent/wasted several hours at the property with ‘their’ client. The buyer ultimately decided she wasn’t going to make an offer on the house, so it was all for naught. I was surprised that the buyer had used both of these Realtors who have enough experience to know better than to spend their time getting played. I’m pretty sure this had been going on for a while with other houses as well.
I showed the same property to a different buyer who told me she had a Realtor, but if it was going to make a difference she would use me to write her offer. In a non-competitive situation if the sellers are comfortable with me writing an offer for a buyer and the buyer insists on me representing them too, I have been known to represent both buyers and sellers. However, this buyer told me she had a Realtor, and the situation looked likely to become competitive anyway so I asked her to use her Realtor. Even if it wasn’t a competitive situation, I probably would have done the same thing, but I didn’t need to make that decision.
Years ago, when my real estate career was in its infancy, I was working with a buyer who was a previous colleague from my former profession. She ended up going to an open house where the Realtor told her she had to use her services or she wouldn’t get the house. So, she wrote the offer with the listing agent and all time I spent with her was wasted. I’m sure if I had written the same offer, it would have been accepted. I simply got snaked. I’ve heard of worse though. A Realtor friend of mine had the same thing happen when her own daughter was snaked by a listing agent!
When July comes around none of these buyer shenanigans will be possible. The National Association of Realtors is mandating that any Realtor working with a buyer must have a binding commission compensation agreement in place. Buyers aren’t going to be able to ‘play’ Realtors anymore. The jig is up, and it’s about time.