Choosing between an investor buyer's agent who competes for the same deals and one who does not

You cannot size the deals you never hear about, so stop trying and change what you can observe. Ask B for a written first look term: for the twelve months of the agreement, any two to four unit in your zips between your price points gets sent to you within 24 hours of her learning about it, and if she wants it herself she says so in that same message before you have spent time on it. Then you are not relying on her ethics, you have a term you can point at. Agents who are actually straight about this agree fast. The other thing, and this is the real reason to lean B: an agent who owns fourteen doors in your band has seen what breaks in those buildings. A's comps being good is table stakes. B knowing that a particular vintage in a particular pocket has a specific sewer problem is worth more than half a point of commission. Two purchases in eighteen months makes a buyer small to both. B's retainer at least buys a claim on her attention.

Agent A looks like the clear choice here. You said it yourself, B picks first. You'll never know what you lost, which means for the whole eighteen months you'll be wondering, and wondering is expensive when you only make two decisions. For anyone who wants income without wanting to audit an agent's motives, paying half a point more to an agent with no competing interest buys the thing that actually matters. @carlos_nunez's first-look clause is clever, and it's hard to see how you'd ever enforce it. She learns about a building at a bar on Thursday. Prove it.

The retainer is the detail worth looking at again. Fifteen hundred dollars non-refundable if the deal does not close is a structure that can end up paying for education rather than results, especially for a buyer who might do two purchases in eighteen months and whose financing was not ready when the first good building showed up. Some states have specific rules about advance fees held by a brokerage, including where the money has to sit, so it is worth asking which account it goes into and getting the answer in writing. On the competing agent question, buying from a market where the agent is also a buyer is often a good sign, because it means the market supports the numbers. What matters is not whether the agent has ever purchased there, it is whether the agent has ever been the seller on a deal with a client. An agent representing a buyer on a purchase from their own portfolio is a different situation entirely, and the disclosure requirements around it vary by state.