In 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.

Sold by the Sell­ing Agent? — NOT

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:

1. seek­ing reli­able ven­dors or sup­pli­ers to pro­vide qual­ity goods at rea­son­able prices
2. nego­ti­at­ing prices and contracts
3. review­ing tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions for raw mate­ri­als, com­po­nents, equip­ment or buildings
4. deter­min­ing quan­tity and tim­ing of deliveries

Trans­lated into the real estate busi­ness, the Pur­chas­ing Agent:

1. seeks to find qual­ity real estate at rea­son­able prices from reli­able sources, such as other agents or pri­vate sellers
2. nego­ti­ates prices and terms of pur­chase and sale agreements
3. reviews fea­tures and exam­ines, with the help of other experts, the sound­ness of prop­erty and
4. 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.