Three dead deals with an agent who buys for his own account

I had a smaller version of this on the land side. Agent had tied up two parcels in the same corridor under option before he ever sent me anything, and the stuff he sent me was the leftover with the access problem. I don't think he did anything wrong exactly, he just wasn't going to hand me the good one. What stung was that he'd walked me through his own comps for six weeks, so I was funding his education on that corridor.

Genuine question and not a dig, ember. On deal one you offered $268k on a $285k list with a 10 day inspection. If his LLC took it at list or near it with no inspection, you didn't lose that to a conflict of interest, you lost it on terms. I've been watching a market for six months and the pattern I see is that the winning offer is usually uglier than mine, not better connected. Deal two looks much worse to me. A three day delay on an address is a decision, not a coincidence.

The structural issue is that an agent with their own acquisition entity has two buyers in the same pipeline and one of them pays them 100% of the upside. That's not automatically disqualifying. Plenty of investors work well with agents who also buy, and those agents often have the best deal flow precisely because they're in the market daily. The overlap is what determines whether it works.

The test is narrow. Ask which entity buys, what price band, what property type, and what geography. If their own box is 2 to 4 unit value-add at $150k to $300k and yours is the same, you're competing for identical inventory and no verbal assurance fixes that. If they buy $500k+ heavy rehab single family and you buy stabilized small multifamily, the conflict is mostly theoretical.

Where it's negotiable is the agreement. A right of first look on anything inside a defined box, written as a specific clause with the box attached as an exhibit, is a real thing people ask for. So is a shorter term, 90 days instead of nine months, renewable if they perform. Whether an agent must disclose a principal interest in a property, and how, is set by state license law and varies by state, so confirm that with an attorney or your state commission rather than with the agent.

On the numbers, ember, $6,400 across eleven months with no property is expensive but the $2,500 was a deadline, not a conflict. Sort those two failures separately or you'll fix the wrong one. The whole answer here hangs on whether his LLC's buy box actually overlapped yours, and you can find that out from public records on his last five purchases in most states, though roughly a dozen states don't publish sale prices at all.

How did you find the LLC connection? I'm building a list of agents to interview and I'd rather do that lookup before I sign anything than after. Registered agent search on the state site, or something else?

I'll push back on the framing. The real cost wasn't the conflict, it was a nine month exclusive with no performance standard in it. I signed something similar on deal two of mine and after that I started writing in a 60 day term with a named deliverable, a minimum of four underwritten off-market opportunities inside my box. If they don't hit it I walk, no argument, no release form drama. Agents who actually source deals sign that without blinking. The ones who plan to forward you MLS alerts get very interested in the term length all of a sudden.

Basic thing I'd have been embarrassed to ask out loud: if the agent buys the house himself, who's representing the seller in that? Is he on both sides of it and is that even allowed? I genuinely don't know how that works.

compass, in a lot of states it's allowed with written disclosure, and the specifics differ enough that it's worth asking your own attorney rather than trusting me.

ember, I'm mostly with keystone. I've got two deals moving right now with an agent who flips constantly, and the reason it works is that he brings me the ones that don't fit his crew, which is anything with a structural repair he doesn't want to schedule. I get called because I'm the exit for his bad-fit leads. That's a real relationship even though it's leftovers, because his leftovers are still off market. Your deal two is the one I'd be angry about. Three days on an address is him deciding whether he wanted it.