We are selling our home in a Northeast state that allows dual agency. Our market is still pretty strong for sellers. However, we have a house that's near the top of the market in our suburban town, so we envisioned it being harder to sell than an entry level home.
We listed the home 3 weeks ago with one of the most productive brokers in town. One of the reasons we picked this realtor is that she claimed to have a very strong network of buyers.
On day 6, we received an offer for 13% less than list price, from a buyer our realtor represented (dual agency). On the one hand, we were grateful that the realtor had produced this buyer from her network. Our realtor claimed this buyer was not even in the market for a new home, and that they were someone in her network that she'd proactively reached out to as she thought our home would be a good fit for them. The offer is 13% lower than list price and has mortgage, appraisal, and inspection contingencies (these are often waived in our market). We were happy to have an offer, but still hoping for something closer to list price and perhaps without all 3 of those contingencies. We countered the buyer, and they refused to budge on any part of their offer.
Here's the problem now. While we felt our realtor made a huge push the first week to market our home, once we had this offer from someone she could potentially collect a commission on, it feels like she's stopped putting in as much effort. She now stands to make 4% total commission on this transaction (instead of 2% as just the sellers agent), so why would she try to drive increased traffic and more potential offers to our home when she might lose the 2% buyers agent commission?
It's of course hard to exactly say if her effort has actually decreased or if this is natural as the home has now been on the market for longer.
We're currently at week 3 on the market, and have little activity on our house. Our agent has said we can stay the course and keep marketing the house, and consider that first offer we got as a backup, but we feel like not much is happening (we have no future showings scheduled, and had only 2 this past week - as compared to multiple showings every single day until we got this first offer on day 6).
We're not sure what to do. We would really like an offer closer to list price if at all possible, but we're fearful that our realtor is either actively driving competition away from the home or just doing nothing to market the home to ensure the offer she brought us as a buyers agent is our only choice.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/RealEstate/comments/1kvpbwe/dual_agency_mess/
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