Agents and agencies are everywhere. Pretty much every manufacturer that makes a product for commercial or industrial use hires an agent to help market, sell and promote that product in a particular region. The agent usually gets a percentage of the manufacturer’s sales in his contractual territory as compensation.
You don’t see the agents because they aren’t working at the retail individual sales level ( except for big ticket items like houses).
There are agents for companies that make lighting fixtures, plumbing fixtures, windows and doors, cabinetry and tile. Those agents work with architects and designers to get their products specified on construction projects and then they use the demand generated by these specifications to convince warehouses and showrooms to carry their products.
The companies that make the food you consume have agents who get the product placed in supermarkets and negotiate for display and shelf space to maximize sales. There are agents (aka sales reps) behind every product you see on the shelf at Best Buy or your local electronics stores. There are agents that specialize in selling farm equipment to large agricultural conglomerates.
Agents are everywhere, it’s a business model that works
Even your own cite, which seems to be outdated, mentions that buyer’s agents are different.
Which again, means you were wrong.
Which is irrelevant considering this conversation is happening in 2011. More importantly, even when an agent (or her company) has buyers and sellers, they still have a duty to the side they are representing in the transaction, even if they are technically on both sides (see my above cite).
You misunderstood the site. The agents they mention are of two types: listing agents , who list a house on MLS and other sites. They are the ones who initiate the sales process, contracting with the home owner for exclusive rights to sell their property. The second agent they mention is a sales agent who works to sell the properties they, or their real estate company, have contracted with. To clarify, one guy signs you up, they next guy tries to entice buyers to buy any houses the company has signed up. To analogize it to a car dealership, the listing agent contracts to get the cars that are to be available for sale while the selling agent sells the car to the customer. You are correct in stating that neither of these people has a primary obligation to the buyer. That’s why the selling agent is called a selling agent and not a buyer’s agent. That’s is the crux of the misunderstanding. We are talking about BUYER’S agents, not SELLER’S agents. Just because they both work with buyer’s doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
Regardless, this is not the way most homes sales work today because individual agents/agencies often do not have a portfolio large and diverse enough satisfy home owners, and because it’s not the most efficient way to match home buyers with home sellers. Today, BUYER’S agents and SELLER’S agents generally split the proceeds of a home sales, while acting in the interest of two separate parties.
I would guess any field where there is an erosion of unions (eg. nursing, teaching), fields where they are outliers that have a greater impact than their compensation would dictate (eg. higher ed.), or where there is a clear path to professional success via specific educational institutions (eg. law, medicine).
I think the mistake is assuming there’s a bottomless supply of agents. There’s a finite supply of potential agents just as there’s a finite supply of potential doctors or potential lawyers or potential teachers. Not everyone has the skills it takes to be a successful agent.
So with a limited pool of agents, where are they going to end up? Like any occupation, they’re going to seek the best opportunities for themselves. And representing professional athletes, rock stars, and actors with multi-million dollar contracts is a better opportunity than representing doctors, lawyers, or teachers.
And why would an agent as opposed to a head hunter/placement service be the type that fills the void?
Agents work in sports/entertainment because the jobs are relatively transient. If you’re always going to be needing another job in a couple months/year then it makes sense to have someone always looking for a job for you.
If you’re only going to change jobs every 5 to 10 years why pay someone a percentage of your salary that entire time for doing nothing? Why not just track them down when you need them?
This was my thought too. An agent helps connect you with the next position/gig/etc. When most positions are essentially permanent, an ongoing agent is of little use. We have something like headhunters, employment agencies, etc. that will perform that job for us “one-off”, but they are not on-going agents in the sense of actors or writers. Indeed, since one aspect they are selling the employer is stability, they want to stay away from revolving doors. (IIRC the headhunter contract for a midlevel position years ago, it was something like “we get X months salary for finding you a suitable candidate, less $Y if he does not last a year.”)
The buyer’s real estate agent it seems was a relatively recent thing that happened as part of the recent real estate run-up starting in the late 90’s. Before that, it was mostly just the seller had an agent.
A friend of mine bought his home in he early 00’s from an ad he found in a local RE paper. When he said he was bringing in his buyer agent, the guy he was talking to went ballistic. It seems this guy would copy ads from other agents’ material, try to attract buyers, and then become their agent. Bringing his own agent basically cut this guy completely out of the loop on a $500,000 sale. That was the first time I ever heard of buyer agents. Before that, everything I heard was about the seller having a agent.
Employment agencies work for the employer NOT the employee. Its up to the employer to hire the agency, negotiate their cut (typically a percentage of the employees first years salary in my experience, not that they are ever going to tell the employee that). The agency lives or dies on their ability to recruit he staff the company requires, NOT getting the employee a good deal .
Book agents are paid by the customer on the other side of the deal, the publisher. After deducting their 15%, they send the author a check for the rest. Later, they handle royalties, rights, and subsidiary payments the same way. Writers never pay their agents a cent at any time.
Sure, same as athletes and musicians. But you can bet those agents are trying to get them a multi-million dollar contract (with its million dollar commission). Doctors and lawyers and teachers don’t have that potential.
No. 99% of actors will never see a million dollar pay check, and if agents only represented actors who might they’d starve. Most acting is done for union scale and for residuals, both of which the agent takes a cut of.
Agents are probably not required for acting gigs in Podunk, and likely not for non-union underground movies even in New York. But casting directors for legit, commercial and industrial jobs in New York (and probably LA) send out calls to agents. Good luck getting in the door if you don’t have one.