If your state banned dual agency outright, would that help you or hurt you?

Ban it. If the agent can't say the price is too high out loud, I'm paying for silence.

@arbor the part I still don't understand is what actually goes away when someone becomes a dual agent. I read a consent form last month and the language was that the agent stops advising on price and stops advocating for either side on terms. So they still open the door, still handle the paperwork, still push the file to closing. They just go mute on the one question I care most about.

If that's right, then in your thin market the choice isn't really represented versus unrepresented. It's an agent who won't talk about price versus no agent who won't talk about price. That makes the ban look less scary to me than it did.

But the forms differ by state and mine may not match yours, so I'd want to read the actual one you'd be signing before deciding. @pike, did yours spell out what the agent stops doing, or was it vaguer than that?

I voted for designated agency only, though I have doubts about it that are worth laying out.

What draws me to it is that a rule requiring two separate agents at least puts two people with two opinions in the room. But I've read enough here to know the wall between them can be thin, especially in a small office where the broker supervises both and the office keeps both halves of the fee. So I'd be trading a conflict I can see for one I can't.

What I'd want before I got comfortable is something plain. How many agents does the office have, who supervises both sides, and whether anything either agent tells their client gets shared upward. In an office of six, the answer to the last one is probably yes in practice, whatever the addendum says.

@arbor, on your land problem, could you keep the local agent as the listing side's agent, hire a lawyer for your own side of the negotiation, and skip buyer representation entirely? I don't know if that's normal where you are, and whether a lawyer can act in that spot varies by state, but the local knowledge and the advocacy don't have to come from the same person.

Running a small team, I'll give you the operator's side of this because nobody in the thread has an incentive to.

I don't let anyone on my team take both sides anymore, and it isn't a moral stand. It's that the complaint risk is asymmetric. When a dual deal goes fine, nobody notices. When it goes badly, the seller thinks I gave away price and the buyer thinks I hid a defect, and I'm defending myself against two former clients on one file. One deal like that eats more hours than the extra half commission ever paid.

We do designated agency instead, and the honest limit of it is what @anchor said. In a six person office, I'm the broker, I see both files, and I have to actually discipline myself not to steer. It works because I set it up so neither agent's split changes based on which side closes. If the office structure pays somebody more for holding both halves, the addendum is decoration.

Ask any brokerage this: does the agent on my side get paid differently if the buyer comes from inside the office? If the answer takes more than one sentence, you learned something.

@cobalt that last question is the useful one and I'm writing it down. The compensation page is where I keep getting lost.

I keep score on this differently. The number I care about is what the arrangement costs, not what it feels like.

On a $400k purchase, a full buy side fee at 2.5 percent is $10,000. In a dual deal the listing agent sometimes shaves that, so say the total drops from 5 to 4 percent and the seller keeps $4,000. Nothing about that reaches me as a buyer unless it shows up in the price, and a seller who just saved four grand has less reason to cut price, not more. So the discount lands on the wrong side of the table.

Against that, put a number on the advocacy I lose. If a buyer's agent who will actually argue price gets me 1.5 percent off, that's $6,000 in my pocket, and I'd owe a fee for it. Whether that trade works depends entirely on whether the agent negotiates or just processes. Most of the frustration in this room comes from paying a negotiating fee for processing work.

@arbor, in your market the variable isn't the statute, it's whether an outside agent can price rural land at all. If they can't, a ban just moves you to unrepresented and saves you the fee. I voted to keep it legal with written consent, and I'd negotiate the fee down hard when I signed.