Agents keep the transaction dispassionate and rational. For example, a buyer might like a home despite its wood-paneled walls, shag carpet, and lurid orange kitchen. When you work with an agent, you can express your opinions on the current owner’s decorating skills and complain about how much it will cost to upgrade the home without insulting the owner. Your agent will translate that to the seller that you very much like the property, but have to to spend $$$ in decorating costs, and thus offer that much less. CONTRACTUALLY SPEAKING There are many contracts and documents involved in purchasing a house. The stack is more than an inch thick. Unless you’re a real estate lawyer, these documents will be foreign to you. Yet, they require detailed and accurate completions. Buying a property is not necessarily a “fill-in-the- blanks” transaction and a mistake, let’s say in title work, could haunt the buyer well down the line after purchase. This very situation happened. A property that sat on a double lot was put on the market. The neighbor bought it to carve off a bit of the second lot to expand his own yard. The seller in the other side then put his home on the market and it sold. Months later, through a property tax notification, it came out that in preparing new deeds for the properties, the expanded yard area was correctly in the name of the neighbor; however, the house had been transferred to the other home buyer. The new homeowner now owned both houses and the neighbor owned his expanded driveway and yard. Fortunately, they were good neighbors and settled the matter with a few signatures. A real estate agent deals regularly with these contracts, conditions, and unexpected situations, and is familiar with
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