Two agents show up in every home purchase: one hired by the seller, and one who should be hired by you. Confusing the two costs buyers more than most people realize. What follows is drawn from a conversation between Brian Foraker and agent Kate Depaola on the Foraker Realty Podcast about what a buyer's agent is actually for.
Two different jobs, not one
Brian drew the line simply:
A listing agent's job is to sell that specific house for the most money, to whoever will pay it. That's not a criticism — it's literally what they were hired to do. It's also exactly why the same person can't fully represent both sides of the same deal.
What happens when a buyer has no one in their corner
Brian was direct about the conflict this creates for a buyer who shows up unrepresented:
"If a buyer comes to me that's unrepresented and they do not want me to represent them, it's against my seller's best interest for me to recommend them to do a home inspection. It's against my seller's best interest for me to recommend that the buyer does a title search."
He put the incentive problem even more bluntly:
"We all know four home inspectors, right? We all know the one that's going to find everything that's wrong with the house. Which one do you think he's going to recommend you to use? Probably the worst home inspector you could find — the one that's not going to blow up the deal."
None of that makes a listing agent dishonest. It makes them exactly what they were hired to be — the seller's advocate. A buyer needs their own.
The part that isn't obvious until you're in it
Kate has watched buyers — including people who deal with contracts for a living — underestimate what buying a house actually involves, once they're a few weeks into a deal and realize how many moving pieces there really are: lenders, inspectors, title companies, insurance, appraisers, and deadlines that all have to land in the right order.
"Instead of you calling eighty lenders and eighty insurance people, here's the lender you want to use, here's the insurance person to call," Brian said.
It's the same kind of coordination Foraker's transaction team handles for sellers — "We have a full-time transaction coordinator. I can tell you the value is there, it's ginormous," as Brian put it — with Sharon Czerwinski, who runs that process, in touch with something like ten different people on every single transaction, buyer's side included.
(More on how that side of it works: Nothing gets dropped.)
Someone to keep the emotion out of it
Buying a home is one of the only major financial decisions most people make while they're also falling in love with the thing they're buying. That's exactly when a second, less emotionally invested person in the room matters most — someone whose whole job is to keep an offer smart even when the buyer isn't feeling especially rational about it in the moment.
Why it's worth it
Brian's closing point wasn't really about real estate — it was about how people decide what's worth paying someone else to handle:
"I pay a professional to do my taxes, I pay a professional for legal work. I could easily go on ChatGPT and get ninety percent of the way there, but I'm not willing to let that happen. When you're talking about the biggest asset in your life — the one you might pass down to your kids — a one or two percent swing in the wrong way could really affect it."
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The full episode is on the Foraker Realty Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhKxm94iTHg