The Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses”

2) Professional buyers contracts must allow a 30 day cooling off period in which the seller may back away from the agreement without punishment.

3) The 30 day cooling off period is initiated by the buyer prominently posting the offer in the local MLS service or similar prominent and accessible system. The buyer is responsible for ensuring any alternative offers during this period are conveyed to the seller.

4) The buyer and seller may avoid the 30 day cooling period by having a certified appraiser conduct an appraisal of the property and executing the sale at no less than 6% below appraised value.

I could throw in a couple other clauses in there to take care of people "brokering" regular sales to straw buyer or about requiring disclosures that recommend sellers consult with family and/or homeowner advocacy group within the 30 day cooling off period, but that is the crux of it.

This wouldn't eliminate the industry, but it would limit the actions of the worst offenders. Offers dramatically below market value should get counters. The worst consequence seems like it would be that the seller will get absolutely swarmed by realtors trying to convince them how much more money they would get with them.

Where I work, there's added complexity to the market in part by the variety of properties and the shortage of skilled agents. Of the licensed agents in the area, only about 30% are actually "full-time" agents, and of that 30% very few will do much outside standard residential work - and we've got several types of specialty agriculture, bare land, commercial, and we are on a state line. Our forms in both states have been going through a surprising amount of volatility the past few years, as have what I'll call "practices", Ie: what's considered normal buyer / seller responsibilities and negotiating chips. For example - with one of these practices I saw a way that our area was behind the times, I started doing things differently and it put my clients in a negotiating position such that my sellers were getting a much higher return relative to comparable properties.

I agree on negotiating skills - unfortunately, the public seem to pick agents based on who they know socially rather than on professional abilities. Finally, to your point about negotiating - one of the challenges for many buyers (and sellers) is that they really don't know the value of a property or where it should sell. So for example many buyers (assuming they aren't in a competitive situation - in which case it's a different set of strategies) will offer some stupidly low number in hopes to get the seller to come back with a reduced price. It's "let's split the difference" negotiating, rather than a data-driven approach. So for example when we go into a negotiation, we don't just index off of the asking price, but rather we've done a market analysis (as a example) of our own and thus have arrived at what we believe to be the fair market price. From that, anything below that number is gravy. So when I not only negotiate below the asking price, but below where we believe the property should fairly sell, then we've really won for the client. Or likewise when I'm on the sellers side, there's a whole slew of ways I set us up pre-market to put us in the best possible position. Even knowing how to read the possibly negotiating strategies for a property, or what "levers and dials" are available in a negotiation isn't something that the general public understands - if you've done a number of deals on your own, you may have developed this expertise.

https://www.sundownmtn.com/the-mountain/snow-report-trail-ma...

Now - sometimes there are emotion-driven data outliers. For example, sometimes you will see someone overpay in cash for a property that could not have appraised at that same value. So again, using data you can account for those scenarios as well. Point being - all that sales data is available and you can pretty accurately create a model of which agents overall are having success not only selling properties, but the degree to which their clients are winning negotiations. I'd argue that even if an agent was being "overruled" by their clients - even that would be interesting, as it would show that their clients were not actually listening to the negotiating advise offered by that agent (IE: the data could actually demonstrate that there are communication / trust issues between the agent and their clients).