I’ve bought and sold a couple dozen homes over my life (some rentals). But none since the new commission situation went into effect. As a buyer is it possible to find and purchase a home without a buyer’s agent? Many of the homes I’ve bought in the past were purchased without a buyer’s agent - I sourced them myself, don’t need representation for the negotiation etc. But the seller’s agent still got the full 5 or 6 %. Is it possible to do that now with the seller’s agent getting less and nobody paying the buyer’s commission?
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So I received an offer yesterday from an unrepresented buyer. My question is if they don’t want representation, who’s doing the purchase contract? They didn’t read the instructions. The format is so bad, it doesn’t even meet the standards for an offer. It needs to be completely rewritten. The question is kind of rhetorical, but this is just one of many problems that will happen when a buyer wants to make an offer on a property.
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Oh no! Another hour of work! Must be worth a full percentage of a home’s value!!!
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Is it possible to buy a house without an agent? Absolutely.
Are you going to save money? Maybe, maybe not.
Is the listing agent going to be the one who benefits from this? Most likely.
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The best reason for dual agency is to get to the front of the line in a competitive market. It’s not to save money.
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Take the agent out of the equation. You’re going to offer whatever you think the house is worth. The seller will accept, counter or reject outright. After you both agree on a price, the seller will pay their agent whatever they agree on. You shouldn’t lose sleep over this.
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But now, the buyer is responsible for paying their agent, not the seller. So you could ask seller what commission they may be offering the buyer agent. If it’s more than 0, you can negotiate a discount based on that information or negotiate to split that with the seller agent who will likely have to put a little more effort into hand holding a buyer directly.
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You can choose not to work with an agent if you want, but you’re going to actually have to do all of the work. You can’t expect the listing agent to do any work for you. You also have no control over the agreement that the seller and the listing agent have signed about what happens to commission if you don’t have an agent.
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As always, you are not forced to utilize buyer representation.
A List Agent may in fact, negotiate a different amount of compensation if a buyers and represented as they may be facilitating additional aspects of the transaction.
But it sounds like a Win for you.
Best of luck
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.It depends on how the listing agreement is written. Some will say 6% to be split between buyer and listing brokers which means if there is no buyer agency then the listing agency gets 6%. We’ve stopped writing it like that and list it separately, but it just depends what form is used and how it’s written. Some have the option to write it either way.
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