THE ADVANTAGES OF A BUYER AGREEMENT – NOW DEMANDED BY THE DOJ
By signing the now required Buyer Agency Agreement your interests are professionally represented - Enlisting the services of a professional Buyer’s Agent is similar to using an accountant to help you with your taxes, a doctor to help you with your health care, or a mechanic to help you with your car. If you had the time to learn everything about accounting, medicine or automotive mechanics, you could do these services yourself. But who has the time? This is why you allow other professionals to help you in their specific areas of expertise.
Your real estate professional at Your Realty Link will take care of the hassles of everyday real estate transactions for you. We will guide you through the home buying process and exclusively represent your interests as we help you find a home, write and present your contract offer, negotiate and close on your home!
YOU GET A PERSONAL SPECIALIST WHO KNOWS YOUR NEEDS Just as your accountant, doctor and mechanic understand your specific needs, your Buyer’s Agent gets to know your real estate needs and concerns. This type of relationship is built through open communication at all times. Your Buyer’s Agent will save you a time by providing you all the details about any home before you see it. In addition, your Buyer’s Agent will listen to your feedback and concerns about each home.
YOU WILL QUICKLY AND CONVENIENTLY GET A GREAT HOME The advantage to signing a Buyer’s Agency Agreement with us is that you will have a professional agent working to find and secure the ideal home for you. It is nearly impossible to find a home that meets your needs, get a contract negotiated, and close the transaction without an experienced agent. You won’t need to spend endless evenings and weekends driving around looking for homes or try to search computer networks by yourself. When you tour homes with your professional Buyer’s Agent, you will already know the homes meet your criteria and are within your price range.
WHAT IS THE BUYER’S AGENCY AGREEMENT It is merely an agreement that as of July 1, 2024 the Department of Justice and our National Association of Realtors and our local boards now require us to have signed prior to even showing you the very first home. You can search for hours and days online but before you set your first showing and enter a home with ‘any’ member agent of NAR, the Indiana Association and MIBOR, you must agree how your buyer’s agent will get paid. No longer does the listing brokerage include in the listing documents a set commission for both the listing agent and the buyer agent. Instead, it is now to be negotiated by your buyer agent in the Purchase Agreement. Actually this amount always could have been negotiated and sometimes was different during the negotiation and not just what the listing brokerage said the buyer’s agent would get paid but the process now is illegal to be set by the listing agent AND it is not ethical for the listing brokerage to put into the listing information that the buyer’s agent will be offered X dollars. The news media and print may have made the recent lawsuit and DOJ decision sound a lot more difficult, but it is really as simple as the negotiation is just more open. The buyer’s agent MUST also now have any buyer sign a form as to how they want their agent to approach getting paid. If you are a buyer that can offer to pay your buyer’s agent directly then whatever used to ‘kind of’ be built into the sales price as it was predetermined what amount would be paid to both agents at closing then you might offer to pay your agent and offer an adjustment in price if your buyer agent believes that the seller will offer to pay the agent OR your buyer agent can just show you homes where he/she will get paid by the seller and the commission is then negotiated by your buyer agent by adding an addendum to the purchase agreement asking the Seller pay your agent X dollars when we close the sale. If paying your agent is a financial burden then you may want your buyer agent to show you homes only where the seller is willing to pay them. This is a discussion that you and your agent need to have right away. IT IS ALL NEGOTIATED and starts with you as a buyer “declaring by signing the buyer agency agreement” even before your agent takes you out to the very first home. Remember, your agent is not just asking you to sign this buyer agency agreement BUT they are in violation of their NAR agreement if it is not signed before they walk you into the first home. Don’t worry – you can discuss whether you want to sign the form for only the one showing they are arranging for you when you first talk/meet or an extended period which gives the agent an opportunity to prove their value and gain your trust. Sign only with ONE agent and be sure that your agency agreement is expired or terminated before you see a home with another agent – if you sign 2 agency agreements with 2 different agents, you may end up in court and be liable to pay an agent even if they were not the one who found your dream home.
If you are uncomfortable as a buyer and need to ask additional questions, feel free to call Janet Giles (YRL’s principal broker) or Brenda Dean (a managing broker at YRL) for any clarification you might need.
JANET GILES, BROKER