The dual agent waives the buy side fee. Who gets that money?

Seller keeps it, and I say that as someone who has been the seller twice in this exact spot. I signed 5%. My net was built on 5%. When the agent came back and said she'd take 3.5 if she brought her own buyer, that was her telling me she wanted the deal, and I did not turn around and hand the difference to a stranger.

The waiver is a variable in the seller's net, so it's negotiable like every other variable. There's no principled home for it. It goes to whoever brings it up first with something the other side wants.

Practically: on 340k a 8,500 concession is 2.5 points of price. If the property has been sitting 60 days you'll get most of it. If there are two offers you'll get none of it and you'll also be the buyer who asked, which is a cost. Underwrite the deal at the full price and treat the waiver as upside you might capture. If your yield only works with the 8,500 you don't have a deal, you have a discount you're hoping for.

Voted price reduction. If the fee vanishing changes nothing on my statement then I consented to a conflict for free and I'd rather just hire my own person.

@sextant that framing helps me. Before I get to who gets the money, what I don't understand is timing. Do you raise this before you sign the buyer agreement, or after the property is picked and the dual agency situation actually exists? Because it seems like the moment you're standing in a house you love, all of your leverage is gone.

@anchor before, obviously. You write it into the buyer agreement as a term, something like if the firm represents both sides the buyer side compensation is credited toward buyer closing costs. Then it's already decided when the situation shows up.

Marlow, that only works if the seller agrees, right? The buyer agreement is between wren and the firm. It can't make the seller lower his price.

@solder correct, and that's the part everyone talks past. A clause in the buyer agreement can bind the firm on what the firm charges the buyer. It cannot reach into the listing agreement. If the seller is paying the whole 5% and the firm waives the buy side, the money returns to the seller unless the seller separately agrees to reduce price. Two different contracts.

Option five for me. In a market where fees are quoted in points, the fee is inside the price. Sellers set asks knowing what comes off the top. Arguing over the waived half is arguing over a number that already got baked in nine months ago when comps were set.

@arbor I want to believe that and the transaction data I've collected doesn't support it cleanly. On the eleven small residential closings I've tracked in one county over two years, in-house deals closed at a median of 1.4% under list and outside deals at 1.1% under. That's four closings on one side of the median, so it proves nothing. But if the fee were fully baked into price you'd expect no gap at all, and the gap that exists is smaller than the fee being waived. Which suggests the seller is capturing most of it. Tell me what's wrong with that read.

Ledger, list price isn't the right denominator. In-house deals skew toward properties that never got real exposure, which means the list was softer to begin with. You'd want it against an independent value, not against the number the same brokerage set.

Dumb question I'd normally not ask. Why would an agent ever waive it? If she's allowed to collect both sides, what makes her give up 8,500?

@compass because the alternative is often no deal at all. A dual agent who insists on the full 5% invites the buyer to go hire their own representation, and then the buyer's new agent starts asking about the sewer lateral and the rent roll and the deal slows down or dies. Waiving part of it is how the agent buys the client's consent to the arrangement. Once you see it as the price of your consent, the question of who gets the money answers itself for a lot of people.

I still voted split, because the seller is also giving something up. He's accepting a buyer who came in through his own agent instead of the open market, and he'll never know what a third party would have paid.

Meridian's last line is the real cost and nobody puts a number on it. The seller might be losing more than 8,500 by not seeing the full buyer pool.

Voted seller keeps it. Not because it's fair, because it's the only answer that matches who signed what. Everything else in this thread is a negotiation, and negotiations don't have an owner.

Wren, the line you should push on is the phrase "at the firm's discretion." That means the firm can also waive nothing, tell you it waived nothing, and you have no recourse. Ask them to replace it with a stated number or a stated formula before you sign. Rules on what has to be disclosed here differ by state and mine required more in writing than the form gave, so read yours against your state's disclosure requirement or have someone who knows it read it.

8,500 on 340k. My whole first deal budget for closing costs is about that. I'd take it as a credit and I'd ask on day one, before I fall in love with anything.

Four deals in and I've stopped asking for the waiver at all. What I ask for instead is the inspection response, in writing, from the seller rather than paraphrased by the agent. On my third purchase the dual agent came back with "seller says the roof is fine," and the seller's actual written answer, which I got two weeks later, offered 6,000. That gap was worth more than any fee waiver and it cost me nothing to demand.

So I voted option five. The money argument is a distraction from the information argument.

Keystone, that's the most useful thing in the thread for me. The fee is one number you can see. What the agent chooses to tell you is the part you can't audit, and asking for the written response is a way to audit a piece of it.