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Good morning. Jim Duncan with Nest Realty and —  thinking about buyer broker agreements in Charlottesville.

I tend to use buyer broker agreements with all of my buyer clients fairly early on in our buyer client realtor relationships and this reason is this: first and foremost it lays out my fiduciary duties to my buyer clients. It’s three and a half or four pages of how I work with my clients. It also lays out my buyer clients’ responsibilities to me. We are making a contractual agreement to work with each other. It professionalizes the relationship as well. It lays out exactly how we’re going to work together.

I don’t do this the first two meetings. I approach it as something that I will be asking for, but the first couple of meetings is sort of a time of dating of us feeling each other out and seeing if we are good matches, if we want to work with each other.

Buyers and Realtors tend to spend a lot of time with each other, anywhere from six to 1,000 hours together looking for houses and home inspections and just time in the car and meeting the kids. It’s a professional relationship, but also one that has to be based on trust, caring, and kindness as well as professional ability to negotiate and manage transactions, etc.

So the buyer broker agreement is something I’m happy to share. I’m happy to negotiate certain items in it.

Predominantly I will always talk about the single agent dual agency clause which takes up almost a page of four pages. So pretty much if you need a page to explain the perils of why dual agency is bad, really, you might want to get rid of it altogether, but I write in all my buyer broker agreements that I will not do single agent dual agency.

So that’s that. There’s more to the conversation about buyer brokerage and why it’s good for buyers. But that’s a good starting point. If you have any questions, ever, please give me a call (434) 242-7140 or www.realcentralva.com Thank you very much. Jim Duncan in Charlottesville. Have a good day.

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Further, read this post at Jay Thompson’s site in which he questions Charlotte Realtors’ attempts to hide Realtors’ compensation from their “clients”.

Another key point of working with a buyer-broker agreement is that it lays out my buyer clients’ compensation to me. Simple. As I said at Jay’s site:

See, I don’t get why folks don’t use buyer-broker agreements. I don’t like my commission *ever* being dependent on what some third-party with whom I don’t have a contractual/client relationship.

My fee is what it is, whether that’s lower or higher than what is being offered through the MLS.

Sometimes my fee is higher than is being offered through the Charlottesville MLS, sometimes it’s lower. But it’s determined via a conversation (or two) between my clients and me. Simple.