The dual agency chapter of my pre-license material makes no sense

On the floor time question, that's a firm-by-firm thing and you can just ask them. Ask the first firm what happens when an agent declines a dual agency situation and whether the lead gets reassigned inside the team or handed off with a referral split. The answer will tell you more about the culture than anything on their website.

This same question came up for me a while back, in a different room. What I got back was that the disclosure requirements and what a dual agent may and may not say differ by state quite a lot, so your book is describing your state and the second firm's designated agency setup might be their own policy rather than a legal requirement. Worth asking which.

plumb, the 20k example is the clean version of the problem and I think it's why the whole arrangement keeps getting squeezed. Once the compensation disclosure is written down and the client can see the agent collects both halves, the client starts asking exactly the question you just asked. Hard to answer that in a kitchen.

Construction analogy that might or might not land: it's like the same firm doing the design and the inspection of the design. Legal in plenty of places, still a thing owners hire around when the stakes go up. Doesn't mean the work is bad. It means nobody's checking it.

girder, that analogy is doing a lot of work but the inspector has a code to measure against. The dual agent has no equivalent standard for whether 275 was a fair price. That's what makes it harder, not easier.

Land deals are where I see this go sideways most. One agent with the only two people in the county who care about a particular 40 acres, no comps to speak of, and both sides consenting because there's genuinely nobody else around. Sometimes that's just the market. plumb, if you end up rural, the practice is more common out of necessity.

Read the consent form itself rather than the textbook chapter about the consent form. The forms are usually short and they tell you precisely what the agent is prohibited from disclosing, which is normally price flexibility and motivation on both sides. Everything else stays disclosable. Once you've read one you'll stop finding the chapter contradictory, though the specific prohibited items differ state to state so read your own state's form.

Running a small team, here's how it actually plays: I don't let anyone on my team do true dual agency, and it isn't a moral position. It's that the complaint risk sits with me as the person who signed off, and defending a judgment call about what you did or didn't say in a kitchen conversation is an expensive way to spend a spring.

plumb, ask the first firm about their errors and omissions history around it. If they've never thought about it, that answers your culture question.

You've had the answer since the third paragraph. You wrote that you'd become a person holding a secret. Someone who frames it that way before they even have a license is going to be uncomfortable the first time and every time after. Take the designated agency firm and stop testing the other one.

Disagree with orchard on the tactics, agree on the destination. Take the interview, ask cobalt's question about complaints, and ask both firms for the actual compensation disclosure they hand clients. The way a firm words that document tells you whether they think of the disclosure as a shield or as a sales obstacle. I've read enough of them to find the difference obvious, and it's a better signal than anything either firm will say to you out loud.