We are planning on listing out house for sale next year. We intend to list it with a particular local RE agent. My question is, is it completely appropriate for us to work with a different agent on our purchase of a new home?
We are planning on moving to one of a couple of areas a few suburbs away from where we presently live. We could go any one of several ways with our new home - buy a nice home, buy a fixer-upper/rehab prospect, or buy a lot/teardown and build. Our main concern would be a decent-sized lot in a location we liked.
ISTM that in order to have the best chance of learning of the most possibilities out there we ought to go with someone with the best local knowledge. The same way I expect the guy who is listing my house to have better knowledge of my town and its market, I’d expect an agent in another town to have better knowledge of their locality than my guy. Maybe know of properties that aren’t listed but might be sold at the right price. That kind of thing.
If we are considering 2 or more different localities, would it be appropriate to have someone looking for us in each of those areas?
If we happen to find something on-line or driving around, should we tell our listing agent and let him show it to us? Could we possibly get him to agree that some portion of any commission he gets on our purchase would offset what we pay him on our sale?
I would say it’s completely appropriate for a buyer to have more than one agent. Especially if you’re looking in a few different areas. Unless you have a signed “buyer’s agent” situation, those can restrict you to a single agent for a period of time.
Note that if your new neighborhood is 45 minutes away from your current home, your listing agent has to drive that far as well, every time you want to see a new house. That’s a lot of time to burn, when they could be working with local customers.
Yes, it is completely ethical and appropriate. You have two separate transactions going on, so you should go with the best agent for each transaction. We did this 4 years ago - the agent we were using for looking for a new house spent a bit of time soft-selling us on signing with her on listing the old house, but when we wound up listing with someone else, she never said a thing about it.
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Yes, provided…
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You haven’t signed an agreement of exclusivity with an agent.
Agents you approach as a buyer will almost invariably try to get you to sign an exclusivity arrangement. They will play down the importance of this; do not believe them. The agreements are usually worded in such a way as “For time period X if Dinsdale buys a property we have introduced him to, we are the abuying agent.” Bear in mind that since they’ll E-mail you the MLS listing for every property from here to Saturn that’s in your desired area and price range, it is virtually inevitable that they’ll technically have introduced you to the property before you can find it.
IANA lawyer or real estate agent and I don’t know your personal situation, but - and I am really being as honest as I can here - you must be extremely, extremely careful with real estate agents. Their interests do not coincide with yours, either as the seller or the buyer; their economic interest is purely in making the sale as quickly as possible in a legally acceptable fashion. Realtors are notoriously dishonest, will try to rush you through everything. They will present stock agreements and pretend “well, it’s just a form and we have to sign it, it’s the form we all have to use, it’s nothing” when in fact they CAN amend it, and the things it says are legally binding and they’ll come after you for it if they can.
I am sure there are honest real estate agents so I don’t mean to insult anyone’s brother who’s an agent, but it is a profession rife with a lack of ethics and conscience.
Personally, I would not use a real estate agent to buy a house if I was staying in the same city. (In fact, we just bought a house last week.) However, it’s worth noting that in Canada you can retain a lawyer for a modest fee to do a title/lien search, check off on the contracts, and all that crap; my understanding is that in the States, at least in parts of it, the realtor does that stuff, so you might not have a choice.
But don’t trust them.
It’s totally ethical, and if you are moving very far, a very good idea to have different agents for buying and selling.
Agents will know their home area better then other areas. For a buying agent, you really want one that knows the areas you are looking in. The reason you are using them is for their knowledge of what is for sale and what the areas are like. Otherwise, you might as well just use an internet site.
Matter of fact, if I was moving over about 15-20 miles, and an agent tried to tell me that they should be my agent for both buying and selling, I would dump them for both. I would believe that that agent is way over representing their ability to do at least of those, and possibly both.