How Home Buyers Can Insult Sacramento Listing Agents

Sacramento listing agents don’t offer the best negotiation tactics for buyers.

Before I get into the reasons about how home buyers can openly insult Sacramento listing agents, let me state for the record that there are agents in Sacramento who don’t care about respect or integrity, they just want the money. It’s a problem for our profession, and it’s also what some home buyers count on.

Oh, they won’t come right out and say it, but it’s implied when they scramble to clarify: the reason we want you, the listing agent, to represent us is because you know all about the property.

That’s baloney. The listing agent doesn’t know “all about the property,” and that’s a ridiculous thing to say. Because what the home buyer really means by that statement is she wants the listing agent to compromise the agent’s ethics, to disregard what is right or wrong. The home buyer goes to Sacramento listing agents because she believes the listing agent will help her to get a good deal — a discounted sales price — because the listing agent would then receive both ends of the commission, twice the incentive. This type of home buyer believes money talks, and integrity walks.

It’s an unspoken assumption on the part of the home buyer, and the listing agent is supposed to be greedy enough to play along. These buyers don’t expect the listing agent to question motives and will deny obvious intensions if pressed because that would make them an undesirable person, a manipulator, and a type of pragmatic person who doesn’t bat an eyelash if their actions get them ahead, as nefarious as they may be.

Listing agents have a fiduciary relationship with their sellers. That relationship means they must put their seller’s needs first and foremost. It doesn’t mean they can throw their seller under the bus just to double-end a deal and get paid twice as much, but some agents do it. Sellers don’t want to hire those kinds of Sacramento listing agents. I know because I ask sellers when I take the listing, and I ask if they want me to work with those kinds of people.

There are always the few home buyers who just don’t know any better. They’ve never bought a home before and they never heard of buyer’s agents, and they think because the listing agent has a sign out front that they should call the Sacramento listing agents. It’s all well and fine to call a listing agent for information, but buyers should not expect an agent to compromise her ethics for them.

It’s insulting. But then I’m an odd duck. I would see it this way.