Home : Blogs : Tony Arko : realdiablog

Business Week Article about Buyers Agents

I just read an article in Business Week that paints buyers agents in a bad light. In a nutshell it accuses buyers agent of steering clients toward listings that pay higher commissions. It makes the assumption that if a home seller or builder pays out more than the standard commission the buyer is overpaying by that amount. It does not however take into account that maybe the seller has a lot of equity in a property and instead of selling at a discount to market prices, they choose to pay a real estate professional a higher commission rate.

These are the kind of articles we need to comment on in order to educate consumers. These articles do damage to the industry.

www.realdiablog.com

Posted by Tony Arko on 12/15/2006 12:19 PM

Comments (3)

commissions, buyers agents, business week

Post is included in group: Loudoun County Agents

3 Comments on Business Week Article about Buyers Agents

DEC

2006

I am of the opinion that we should totally ignore anything negative from the print, tv or any other media. They don't know what we do and don't really care. They are simply looking for a story. If they can't find one, they make one up.

For Mr. Coy to assume that a buyer's agent can steer clients into buying a home with a higher commission versus a home with a lower commission, he must be assuming that agents have Jedi powers and that buyers are morons.

With so much information available to buyers on the web such as listing sites, AVM's and blogs on community market values and conditions, buyers can find most properties on their own anyway and have an excellent idea of what they should or should not be paying for properties.

And what a seller does with their profits and what they choose to pay agents is up to them, not the buyer or anyone else. They have already negotiated the commission to both listing and selling brokers in the Listing Agreement. Mr. Coy seems to think that the buyer has the right to negotiate on something that they are not party to.

Funny how buyer's agency was created in the 90's as a response to thousands of consumers who were misrepresented by listing agents and now buyer's agency is getting bashed...

I think it's important to be able to respond to someone's question about articles like that of Business Week. But then I feel newspapers and many magazines just work for sensationalism. They want to stir the masses and get them going. But if I keep going, I'll get on my soap box about newsprint and that's not really what you want. Thanks for bringing the article to my attention.

Leave a response…

Name:

Email:
(optional)

Comment:

What does the graphic say?