What does the Selling Agent Sell?
Tags: listing agent, purchasing agent, real estate dictionary, real estate lingo, Selling AgentIn a word: NOTHING.
When I go house hunting with a buyer I have nothing to sell. I don’t own the houses and condos I show. Yet, in the lingo of real estate I am the Selling Agent.
Until the early 1980s there was only one agent:
the Listing Agent. Buyers thought they were represented by the listing agent when, in reality, they weren’t represented at all. When we bought our first home in 1982 we knew nothing about real estate. The agent was a nice guy and it looked to us as if he was “on our side.” He wasn’t.
Now, some 25 years later,
many people, especially first-time buyers, know as much about real estate as I did back then. And, while “buyer agency” started in the early 1980s, the concept of being represented as a buyer by an agent devoted entirely to the buyer’s interest still needs to be explained and promoted.
Expunge the term Selling Agent
from the real estate vocabulary. Use instead the term Purchasing Agent, a term widely understood by anyone who’s ever dealt with business.
Business dictionaries describe the role of a Purchasing Agent as:
- seeking reliable vendors or suppliers to provide quality goods at reasonable prices
- negotiating prices and contracts
- reviewing technical specifications for raw materials, components, equipment or buildings
- determining quantity and timing of deliveries
Translated into the real estate business, the Purchasing Agent:
- seeks to find quality real estate at reasonable prices from reliable sources, such as other agents or private sellers
- negotiates prices and terms of purchase and sale agreements
- reviews features and examines, with the help of other experts, the soundness of property and
- ensures that transaction moves forward in a timely manner according to the contract and closes as agreed.
Purchasing Agents
are used in business where either price or quantity or both are significant and where an individual with special product expertise can save a company money or otherwise add value to the transaction. Purchasing real estate is for most people the highest value transaction and to engage a purchasing agent with special expertise makes sense.
When the time comes to hire an agent
to help you find a home or condo ask the agent to give you a job description for what he or she will do for you. What IS the special expertise? Where’s the value for YOU? The last person you want to hire is an agent who want to “sell you on a property.”
Terminology is local
The term Selling Agent is used in Washington State and elsewhere across the USA. A website, calling itself the Real Estate Dictionary gives this definition of Selling Agent: “A real estate broker or salesperson who writes the purchase offer for a buyer in a real estate transaction, but may not actually represent the buyer.” WRONG in this part of the world and evidence for why the term Selling Agent should be eliminated.
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August 6th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
This makes entirely too much sense.
Apparently, logic doesn’t enter into the real estate jargon.
Thanks for an exceptiionally inciteful commentary. Now, how do you (the industry) make change in the misuse of terminology. It’s more than semantics. Words and names mean something. Apparently folks in the real estate industry have never examined how these terms are interpreted by the client. Or, is the confusion on purpose?
Keep up the good work on challenging perceptions.
August 6th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Thanks, Robert.
The general lack of transparency is hurting the “traditional” real estate industry. It has allowed Zillow, Trulia and other real estate portals to position themselves as the friendly places where home buyers and sellers can get help. This is the job the local MLS and Realtor(R) organization should be doing.