A blank line on the buyer's agent compensation page of a listing agreement

The blank being blank is such a small detail, and it changes the whole feel of the transaction. Before, the number simply existed somewhere on the page and the seller signed near it. Now she had to write it with her own pen.

That page is on nearly every listing agreement now. A good listing agent explains it in about ninety seconds and then says the useful part: the buyer side compensation is marketing spend rather than a fee. Framed that way, the blank gets much easier to fill in.

So the seller can just put zero? I've read three articles about this and none of them said it that plainly.

@paulgrant17 yes, and some people do, and in most markets most of them still do not. The choice is real. What happens after the choice is a market question, and it varies a great deal with how hot the area is.

@wendy_park48 what works here is that you did not pretend to know the answer to why would I pay the buyer's agent. That question belongs to the competitive side of the sale rather than the paperwork side.

A pattern that holds across service businesses is that people accept a cost far better when they choose the number themselves. Your neighbor writing it in her own handwriting probably ended the argument permanently.

In rural markets the showing count argument hits harder. If four people a month are looking at anything in that price band, you really do not want to give one of them a reason to skip you.