spinoff to buyer's agent thread

Sorry if this is a stupid question - I'm very new to the house buying world.

Do agents strictly represent sellers or buyers? Or, if we meet an agent we really like at an open house that is representing the seller(but are not interested in that particular house) can we ask that person to be our buyer's agent and show us other houses? Or do they only deal with the seller side of things?

When you have a buyer's agent, do you have to exclusively work with them?

If meeting them at an open house isn't a good way to meet a potential buyer's agent, how do you do it?

Thanks!

Re: spinoff to buyer's agent thread

I don't know if this helps but here is my experience. We started going to open houses a while before we were truly ready to buy. We looked around at a few houses and found a real estate agent that we liked. She took us around to a bunch of houses. she got inpatient and didn't want to work with us anymore.

So we went to more open houses. We found an awesome real estate agent. She took us wherever we wanted, answered tons of questions and understood our timeframe and wasn't pushy. She was the one that helped us find our house and she was the our agent and therefore got some of the commission on the house. If we didn't have an agent the seller's agent would have gotten all of the commision. Our agent did so much work for us. I emailed her questions all of the time.

Let me know if you would like any more info. Good luck.

Re: spinoff to buyer's agent thread

I am pretty sure it works both ways. Most real estate agents can be both buyers agents and sellers agents in a typical day. We really wanted a buyers agent but still felt that someone who worked both sides might not be as forthcoming with information. So we actually worked with a company that were exclusive buyers agents. That is all that they do. They do not have any of their own listings, and they never represent the seller.

Re: spinoff to buyer's agent thread

We worked with a buyer's broker. She was great. She told us a buyer broker can share more info than an agent because an agent is working for the seller even if it isn't there listing.

Our broker could tell us if she knew the seller was looking to lower a price, if she knew they were getting divorced, etc. Anything the seller shared, she could ethically share with us where a traditional agent can not share if the seller disclosed info.

Our buyer broker also would show us FSBO and other properties that an agent might not show because of commission.

The only downside is if we bought a FSBO or a discount real estate listing, we had to make up the difference in the commission.

HTH