Real Estate Information Archive

Buyer’s Agent

If you are buying or selling a home in the Baton Rouge area, you might have come across the term “buyer’s agent” in your research and wondered just who these people are, and what they do, and by the way, do I need one?

These are all excellent questions that deserve equally excellent answers from professional, experienced real estate experts. Fortunately, you’ve found the best place in Baton Rouge to get all of your questions answered and problems solved: The Glenda Daughety Team.

In this blog post, you will learn what a buyer’s agent does, the advantages of hiring one, and why The Glenda Daughety Team should be your go-to agency, not solely as a buyer’s agent, but also for the full spectrum of real estate situations.

Buyer’s Agent 101

The simplified definition for a buyer’s agent is, as the moniker implies, a real estate professional who is hired by the buyer of a property in order to guide the buyer through the often tedious, not infrequently confusing, and sometimes vertigo-inducing real estate purchasing transaction.

If it helps, you could think of your buyer’s agent as the real estate equivalent of a Sherpa: They are there to keep you from getting lost or (financially) hurt on your expedition to the summit of the property purchase mountain.

When you hire one of the Glenda Daughety Team’s buyer’s agents, he or she can help you with myriad aspects of buying a home including providing an expert’s eye for potential problems, negotiating to get you the best possible price and terms, and overseeing the transaction process to make sure it proceeds smoothly.

It would be understandable for you to take into account the fact that a buyer’s agent adds costs to the transaction in the form of a commission; however, in the majority of cases, the buyer’s agent works directly with the seller’s agent and the commission is split. Often more important, however, is the potential cost of not having an agent when problems arise or if a transaction takes an unexpected turn. In most cases, of course, the seller is represented by an agent and as a buyer you may suffer from an “expertise gap” if you are not advised and represented by an expert.

The three primary types of buyer’s agents, according to the National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents, are as follows:

• Buyer’s Agent (BA): A conventional real estate agent who works with property listings as a major part of the agency for which he or she works. These folks are sometimes referred to as a “dual agent” because they are usually hired to represent each side – seller and buyer - of a real estate transaction.
• Single Agency Buyer Agent (SA): An agent who is hired to represent only one side of a real estate transaction – seller or buyer – and as such, does not act as a dual agent.
• Exclusive Buyer Agent (EBA): This agent works for an office that represents only buyers and does not work with general real estate (seller’s) listings.

These are condensed definitions meant to give you an informed jumping-off point into determining the type of buyer’s agent will best fulfill your specific, personal and unique needs.

For more in-depth information about buyer’s agents, check out Nolo LAW for ALL.

Some people who listed their Baton Rouge real estate and homes for sale recently on an online classified advertising site, such as Craigslist or HotPads, found themselves victimized by unscrupulous con artists.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that there are diabolically selfish people in the world who will do just about anything to get money, regardless of who they might hurt, run over or destroy to get it.

It’s not just that these people do not care about how the repercussions of their actions are going to affect their victims. In fact, they are absolutely counting on many people to have a trusting or even naive nature.

A perfect example of this type of greedy mindset recently reared its ugly head for some homeowners in Baton Rouge, including the President of the Greater Baton Rouge Association of Realtors, Linda Gaspard.

These scammers have figured out how to gain access to ads and add their own text to them. Many of these contained a sentence in them that said something akin to, "I have decided to rent it out due to our transfer to West Africa for missionary work."

Safety in Anonymity

There are countless ways in which the relatively fast growth, expansion and innovation in communication technology has enriched our lives. So much so that most of us who are less than 40 years old probably cannot imagine what life must have been like before smart phones, personal computers and the Internet.

Because we entrust so much of the financial interworking and logistics of our daily lives to the cold, impersonal abyss of cyberspace and most of the time everything works out just fine, we can easily overlook some of the warning signs of scams that in hindsight appear to be glaringly obvious.

Some of the most common red flags to look for include:

• Terribly poor grammar
• Grossly overpriced property
• Grossly under priced property
• Any request for you to wire a monetary deposit

For most of us, the idea that we might be getting scammed doesn’t enter into our minds unless the same type of con has been run on us before or we begin noticing that things just don’t feel right.

So remember, do not give personal information to anyone over the Web unless you have absolute trust in the person or company to whom you are giving it. And, if you think you are being victimized by an online scam, your best recourse is to contact your local police or sheriff’s office.

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