My lease option buyer's agent just found out I'm the one selling and went quiet on me for two days

Your attorney is right that this is not dual agency. Dual agency means one agent representing both sides. Here you have a buyer's agent who represents only the buyer, which is how it should work. The problem you are naming is different: she now knows your identity, and with it she can probably estimate your position in the deal.

That information asymmetry is real, and it is not a violation of anything. It is just negotiation. Sellers' identities are often discoverable through public records, entity filings, or a few minutes of research. She may have found out anyway. The two-day silence probably was recalibration, as you said, but she came back professional and the deal is moving. That matters more than what happened in her head during those two days.

The $11,000 spread is worth thinking about carefully. On a tight assignment like that, one concession, whether it is a repair credit, a closing cost contribution, or a price reduction, can cut the number significantly. The question is not whether she knows who you are now. The question is which terms still have room and which ones do not. Your attorney and whoever structured the option with you are the right people to work through that with, since the specific language of your assignment agreement controls what you can and cannot flex on.

One thing worth knowing for future deals: some investors who do assignment work try to keep the end-seller identity behind an LLC or a transactional coordinator for as long as possible, specifically to prevent this kind of mid-process recalibration. It does not always hold, but it buys time. The strategy guide section on information management in assignment deals covers this angle if you want to read further.

What is the buyer's agent actually asking for right now? That would help figure out where the real pressure is sitting.

The assumption doing the most work here is that the agent's two-day silence was about recalibrating against you specifically, but there is an equally likely read: she went quiet because she suddenly understood the structure and had to decide whether her buyer is adequately protected in a lease option assignment, which is a different calculation than negotiating price. Buyers' agents who encounter option assignments mid-deal often pause because they are not sure what their fiduciary duty looks like when the contract being assigned was never between their client and a traditional seller in the first place. That pause may have had nothing to do with your $11,000 spread and everything to do with her own exposure.

The information asymmetry your attorney described matters more on the option terms than on the purchase price. If she now knows your assignment fee is roughly $11,000, she may push her client toward a direct conversation with your optionor, which would not blow up the deal but would cut you out of it. The place to shore up control is the language in your assignment agreement that prohibits the buyer from contacting the original seller directly, and whether that language has any teeth given that Greensboro is a disclosed-agency state where she may have an obligation to tell her client about routes around you. What does your option agreement with the original seller say about assignment consent, and does it require the optionor to route all buyer communication through you?

That silence wasn't about ethics, it was about leverage, and you just handed her a number.

@grantwhitley hasn't posted yet so I'll jump in.

The line that got me was "knowing exactly who I am and what I need out of this." That's the real exposure. She doesn't just know you're the seller now, she probably knows your assignment spread is thin, and if she's any good she's already working backward from what you can't afford to lose. I had something adjacent happen on a short note deal in Akron where the other side figured out my basis before closing and the last week of negotiation was just them finding the floor I couldn't go below. Cost me about four thousand dollars I hadn't planned to give away, which on that deal was meaningful. The structure that made sense when the parties were strangers stopped making sense the second one side had the map. What I'd want to know is how she found out, because that changes whether this is a one-time information leak or whether you've got the same exposure on the next deal in the same market.