When you're visiting open houses and you haven't started working with a buyer's agent yet, the listing agent will often encourage you to submit offers directly to them. No buyer's agent involved whatsoever. This situation is called dual agency and it's almost always a bad idea. To understand why we need to look at both the costs and the benefits of going with a dual agency relationship, a lot of buyers think that going with dual agency means that the commission will be lower, and it makes sense you have one fewer mouth to feed, so why wouldn't the commission be lower? why wouldn't the seller save money making your offer higher? Well it's actually not the case. Most listing agreements are structured where the seller agrees to pay the listing agent a fixed commission- most commonly six percent, and then if the buyer has an agent it's split, so three percent per side. If you go direct to the listing agent they just pocket the whole six percent and that's why they want you to go directly to the listing agent, they get paid twice as much. On the cost side it's a little bit more straightforward, dual agency is controversial because the dual agent cannot look out for the best interest of both parties, what's good for the seller is bad for the buyer and vice versa. In fact dual agency is illegal in 10 states because that fiduciary obligation is completely broken in a dual agency relationship. There's also a financial cost to dual agency because the alternative is working with Yoreevo and getting a commission rebate for up to two-thirds of the total commission, so whether you're looking at it from an agency perspective or just purely a financial perspective, there's a huge cost to going with a dual agency relationship instead of working with Yoreevo. If you'd like more information about that you can reach out to me. My email is james@yoreevo.com, I'm happy to walk you through dual agency and all the puts and takes in more detail.