John Meussner posted “Representation: You're Doing it Wrong“

A story of the Seller's wife acting as an agent for the Buyers, unprofessional, causing them finally to cancel the deal. The story seen through the eyes of a good mortgage professional, who is working with the Buyers, and has to deal with the wife of the Seller, as the Buyers are not represented by an agent.

John writes “I'm not sure I've ever seen a bigger conflict of interest in the 8+ years I've been doing this.”

What conflict of interests we are talking about? If the buyer knows that she is not charging the Buyer; she is helping the Buyer who is not represented by his own agent. Not sure you can go after her for as long as the Buyers knew that she was a licensee, and that she was the Seller’s wife.

To me it is not obvious that she represented the Buyer, as John believes. She was helping without pay, which she, being a licensee, can, but I am far from sure that rises to representation.

All States are different, but in Florida, as transaction broker, you can work with both sides. It is more about disclosures.

Maybe she was not “professional”, but was it breaking the laws, or even the Code of Ethics if she was a REALTOR, which we, by the way, do not know?

But it is not the story that surprised me. I am surprised by the discussion. How we, agents, are looking at a professional situation (as happening in business), but doing it as if we are not real estate professionals.

The post is featured, there are dozens of comments, and to tell you the truth, I am a little at a loss here.

This would, probably, be fine on any other site, but not on Active Rain. What John wrote about was not really a mortgage issue, but rather a real estate issue, or at least John put it this way.

So, is it a real estate issue? Or, better say, is there an issue at all? Isn’t the answer to this question what our readers could expect from an excellent group of real estate professionals? But if this is the case the expectations were not met.  The discussion is missing the professional part.

The discussion is not about whether it is illegal and why, the discussion is about that we do not like it. And quite a few labels with no support or justification. But the fact that we do not like something does not automatically make it illegal. We may feel that it is wrong, but it does not mean it is illegal.

I am far from thinking that agents are stupid. Why then we did not address the situation? Why we did not look at it with a professional eye?

Was there representation, and was it wrong, as John believes?

If I write how outrageously unprofessional was the mortgage broker, who quoted me 2.5% PMI on HUD backed HECM (Home Equity Conversion Mortgage, one of Reverse Mortgage programs), what a rip-off it is, and that I would never ever deal with this guy ever again, I would most probably immediately get the clarification, that this mortgage broker did nothing wrong, and these are the FHA guidelines under certain loan parameters, and so on and so forth.

They would, probably, correct me right on the spot. And this is what customers expect from professionals. And if dozens of mortgage professionals would keep commenting that yeah, they understand how I feel, and rates are high, and then I find out that this is according to the FHA guidelines, what would I think about the mortgage professionals, who commented but did not straighten me out?

Of course, laws vary from State to State, and what is legal in my State of Florida, may be not be legal in another State, so it would really be interesting to read what real estate professionals from that State think about the situation. Not about how bad apples affect the rest of us, but whether there is anything illegal in what happened to the buyers.

Too often we complain that bad apples give us bad name. Here IMO we have a case of collectively giving a bad name to ourselves.

It is not the first time I am wondering about it. AR used to be a platform where the ideas were flying and discussions were very involved and interesting simply because of it.

It feels like we became more superficial now. That we are less engaged now, and allow it to fly by without stirring the pot. It is not that we do not see the way we used to see, we sort of are saving the mental effort and simply move on, leaving general comments. We used to dive, and now we prefer gliding on the surfice...

When you have several dozens of general gliding comments on a specific situation, if you are a customer/reader, what would you think about the professionals?

After all, they see what we display.

What do we display?