Pittsboro Real Estate Agent Eric Andrews discusses when and how you may need to impeach (fire) your real estate agent.
Speaker 1: How do you impeach your real estate agent?
Speaker 3: You can be impeached. It’s a hot topic right now. If you want to impeach your real estate, first of all, there’s two sides to a transaction. There’s, you’re either a seller or a buyer. And with a seller, we have a listing agreement and you’ve had the property listed and things just aren’t going well. And you might have a six month, a one year, I even do, sometimes I do a two year listing contract. If it’s a big piece of land and we’re doing a lot of advertising for it, it’s going to be a two year contract. But normally residential is around six months and everything. You’re in your first month of a residential contract, listing contract and things aren’t going well, you’re not happy with how your real estate agent is keeping in touch with you. What kind of job they’re doing, how they’re marketing their property.
You can impeach them. You can fire them. And everybody’s like you have a listing contract. Really, the listing contract is to protect the listing agent. They do all this work, they market and advertise your property. And then some buyer calls the seller and says, Hey, we don’t have to pay these commissions. Let’s just do a deal ourselves. And so that’s what a listing contract is to enforce that the agent that’s done all that work is going to be compensated for that work. But if you’re just not happy with the jobs that they’re doing. No real estate firm, no broker in charge, no selling firm wants an unhappy seller. So they would go to the real estate firm and say, I want out. There might be some money. The agent might need to be compensated for the drone photography or the stage or the professional photographer or whatever.
So it might cost you a few hundred bucks to get out of it, or if you want to be super mean about it and everything, and just say okay, well, no showings. I’m not going to make my place available for showings. And then you might have to wait until the end of the listing agreement. But usually in that scenario, the listing agent’s going to go, well this is a hostile situation. I really don’t want to be involved. And so it’s kaput at that point. The buyer’s agency agreement is pretty much the same story. You’ve hired a buyer’s agent. So this is a buyer and you have a contractual arrangement. You’ve signed a buyer’s agency agreement. And they’re not showing you anything. You decided on a different area. Somehow. You didn’t know what you were doing. You signed a six month agreement for all of North Carolina and it’s just not working out and they’re not available.
They’re always on vacation. Whatever. Again, you go to the agent and say, I want to terminate that contract. And they’re like, well why? There’s hardly ever a situation where a buyer’s agency’s going to have some kind of release fee or whatever. So if they want out, they’ll probably going to let you out. And if they don’t let you out, go to their boss, go to their boss’s boss. I mean, you go to the broker in charge and you say, I want out of this buyer’s agency agreement for X, Y, and Z.
Real estate agents want to help clients that want to be helped. And that contract is a contract between the buyer and the real estate agent to say, we’re going to work together. You’re not going to screw me over at the last minute. And I’m going to do all this work and not get paid. So if everything’s like going together, that’s what that agency agreement’s for. That buyer agency agreement, it’s not meant to lock you into unhappy situation. So if you’re not happy with the agent, there are several ways. Just keep ongoing up the chain and your agent can be impeached.
