Everything A Real Estate Agent Doesn't Want You To Know - Who Has Control Over Your Deal Anyway?

Okay home buyers and sellers, It’s that time of year again! Time to think about doing what people always do, year after year, in the same predictable way as always. What is that you ask?

Home sellers will call real estate agents to come out to their house to sell them on signing a long-term listing contract with a 50/50 chance of getting hooked up with an under-performing, part time quasi-lazy sales agent who sells real estate (maybe) to "augment their income". That’s right, home sellers all over America will be duped into dumb deals with fast talking agents who will simply throw their listing into the MLS (multiple listing service) and hope another agent gets lucky and sells it for them. The same old stuff, year after year…

And home buyers too… they will call real estate companies to "inquire about homes" and end up spilling their financial guts out to some para professional, part time real estate sales person (who typically "legally" represents sellers and not buyers) and from there it goes downhill in favor of the agent. That’s right! The agent will have you sign enormous amounts of disclosures and other documents in the process of finding all they need to know about your financial wherewithal to buy a home, information that should really be kept confidential until the (right strategic time for the buyer), not the agent. Nope, that’s not how the real estate people play home buyers. They send them to "friendly" loan officers to get pre-qualified for a home loan and by the time you go out to look at houses, the agents know way more than they should about you, your numbers and your buying strategies. The result? You will pay several more thousands of dollars then you should… money you should have, could have and would have kept in your pocket if you only knew how to play the game. But you don’t and they do and you lose, whether you realize it or not, every time.

And you can forget about the crooked little buyer broker too… that’s a scam if I ever saw one and fodder for a future article. I will say this about buyer reps: how can a real estate agent sign a listing contract to represent the "best interests" of a home seller and a buyer rep agreement to represent "the best interest" of a buyer at the same time? They can’t unless the buyer rep does not represent sellers whatsoever. Even then, it’s a little shaky for the buyers.

What’s the result of this mess? Home sellers waste time and money, buyers spend to much money and the real estate agents earn big fats commission checks whenever they get around to having someone else sell a home for them.

There is so much home buyers and sellers don’t know that I had to write two books, one for buyers and one for sellers called "Everything A Real Estate Agent Doesn’t Want You To Know" to cover their bases effectively. There are so many problems lurking in the real estate system that it will simply blow you away… and it costs consumers billions of unnecessary dollars each year playing the game according to the stupid rules WRITTEN by "licensed sales agents". Now, what’s wrong with that picture? I’ll tell you what is wrong with that picture…

CAVEAT EMPTOR or buyer beware. Whether you are a home seller or a home buyer you better know what you are doing because if you get screwed, well, that is your own fault. How could that be you ask? Because the NAR (national association of realtors) is one of the largest special interest groups in the nation and they have squeezed congress to write real estate laws in their favor. Which means, if you make a bad decision in a real estate deal, shame on you, that’s your bad, not theirs. You should have known how to play the game. That’s fair isn’t it? They have real estate licenses… but you are on your own…. That’s fair!