Picture it. You’re standing outside a real estate office looking at a window full of Cape Cod homes for sale while waiting for your pager to vibrate, indicating your table is ready. Your eyes are immediately drawn to a beautiful, waterfront property on Nantucket Sound listed at a very attractive price. You’ve got a few minutes to kill, so you venture inside and tell the Realtor on-duty you’d like some additional information about a home you saw in the window. The Realtor is more than happy to assist you and invites you to sit down. He then pulls out a 2-page form and a pen and begins to place them in front of you, seemingly hoping you’ll sign it. Your body freezes, beads of sweat appear on your forehead, and you gaze intently at your table pager hoping that mental telepathy will cause it to activate and rescue you from this predicament.
What’s your next move? Just relax! The Realtor isn’t trying to push you into signing any sort of contract. He’s following the LAW and presenting you with the Massachusetts Mandatory Disclosure Form. This form which MUST be presented to anyone inquiring in-person about a specific property is really intended to protect YOU, the potential Buyer. Among other things, it lets you know whether or not the Realtor is representing the Seller of that property. If he is, at the very least, you deserve to know that.
When I bought my first home in the mid-80’s, there was no such thing as “Buyer representation”. ALL agents involved in a sale were “working” for the Seller; even the agent who was taking me around every weekend looking at different houses. It was called “sub-agency” and the problem was that the majority of Buyers didn’t even realize that the agent working with them was really an agent for the Seller.
“So what’s the big deal?”, you might ask? The big deal is that as an agent for the Seller, that agent owed his complete fiduciary responsibility to the Seller, not to me. So while he certainly couldn’t LIE to me about a property, he also couldn’t tell me lots of things that may have helped me get a better deal. And he did not need to keep anything that I told him confidential, such as my financial situation, other properties I’d seen, or my sense of urgency. This gave the Seller a significant upper-hand.
In 1993, the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Real Estate Brokers and Salespersons adopted a new law designed to protect consumers by enabling them to make informed choices about who is representing them. That law mandates that the Massachusetts Mandatory Disclosure form be presented at the first personal meeting you have with an agent to discuss a specific property. It is a DISCLOSURE form, NOT a contract. It doesn’t bind you in any way to working with a specific Realtor beyond this encounter. But it does let you know whether or not the Realtor is representing the Seller of the property in question, and if not, it lets you choose to have that Realtor represent YOUR interests for the specific property in question. You can also choose not to sign it at all.
If a Realtor does not present this form to you at your first face-to-face meeting about a particular property, be sure to ask for it. And never disclose any information regarding your finances or personal circumstances until it is clear who the Realtor is representing.
Now go enjoy your dinner!
Marie