Found out at the table that both agents work in the same office

The distinction you signed is the one worth understanding. Dual agency in the strict sense is one agent representing both sides. Designated agency splits the two sides between two agents inside one brokerage, and the brokerage keeps both halves of the commission. Whether that split actually cures the conflict depends on your state's statute and on the brokerage's internal policy, so ask your broker of record for the written policy on information sharing between designated agents.

On your numbers: 212 plus 41 is 253 into the deal. At 292.5 you're 39.5 over cost before commissions, and if you're paying roughly 5 percent gross that's about 14.6k, leaving something in the mid twenties before carry, closing costs, and whatever the appraisal gap does to your buyer's financing. The answer depends entirely on your holding cost per month. At 1,800 a month all in, a 45 day relist eats 2,700 plus the risk the next appraisal lands in the same place, because appraisers in the same pocket often pull the same comps.

The advice to split does not by itself indicate a soft agent. Splitting an appraisal gap is a common outcome. What you can test is whether your agent gave you the underlying data. Ask for the appraiser's comp selection and whether any of the three are meaningfully inferior to your finished product. If your agent can't or won't produce that, you have a service problem regardless of who else in the building is getting paid.

You signed at the table because you wanted the deal. That's the honest chain of events and it's also how most of these get signed. Worth remembering next time that the disclosure is supposed to come before you have money on the line.

I'm new so forgive the basic question, but does the broker of record actually have a duty to flint here? The post says duties to nobody in particular and that seems like it can't be right.

juniper, the broker usually does have duties, they're just described at the firm level rather than the individual level, and how they're worded differs by state. In some states the firm is treated as the dual agent and the two designated agents are carve-outs from that. In others the designation is cleaner. That's a question for a licensed professional in flint's state, not for us.

flint, on the softness: 3,500 off an inspection that found nothing structural is the tell, not the appraisal gap. The gap is real, the appraiser wrote a number. The 3,500 is a buyer testing whether you'll flinch. I'd give the gap and hold the 3,500.

Disagree with keystone slightly. Give the 3,500 and hold the gap, because the gap is the piece that touches the buyer's loan. If they need the appraised value to make the LTV work, they have to come up with cash or you drop price, and asking them for cash on a 12 day close is how deals die. The 3,500 is discretionary and can be conceded later as your last card.

Both of you are treating the same-brokerage thing as noise. flint, ask one question and see what happens: tell your agent you want to counter at 299 firm with no credits and see how hard she pushes back. If the pushback is data, fine. If the pushback is about the relationship with the other desk, you learned what you wanted to know for free.

The thing I'd want to know is whether the brokerage has a policy on this at all or just the state form. A lot of smaller firms use the state disclosure and never write anything internal, which means the wall between the two desks is whatever those two agents feel like it is on a given Tuesday.

What sticks with me here is that flint signed something at closing without reading it and it was still a reasonable decision. I have zero deals under my belt, and I assumed the whole game was never doing that.