How Many Agents Can A Sacramento Home Buyer Hire?

The consensus seems to be lately that if one Sacramento real estate agent is good to have in your corner as a Sacramento home buyer, then 5 Sacramento real estate agents would be 5 times better, right? Just hire them all and ask all 5 of those agents to beat the bushes searching for homes for you, right? This is what some Sacramento home buyers believe. It’s also probably why they aren’t buying any homes. Hiring more than one agent is just not a good idea.

Buyers don’t seem to understand that the answer to how many real estate agents can you work with is one.

If a Sacramento home buyer is unhappy with her agent, then the solution is easy, fire the agent. But if the buyer is happy with her agent, why would she call another Sacramento real estate agent and try to put that agent to work for her? I refuse to work with other agent’s buyers, but not every Sacramento real estate agent operates in the same manner. Some don’t care if they are wasting time or interfering in another agent’s transaction. If a buyer looks hard enough, a buyer will find some desperate agent somewhere who will let ethics slide in hopes of putting together a deal.

The bottom line is there are no secret listings, really. Everybody gets their listing information from the same sources. True, I might tell some of my buyers about a new listing before it is official in MLS, but these are buyers who are exclusive to me and my team. At Lyon Real Estate, for example, we have the right to withhold listings from MLS for 3 days and put them into our internal database.

But please, don’t ask me to step on the toes of another agent just to bring some Sacramento home buyer who is not loyal to either of us a transaction — because that’s not how most of us do business. Pick an agent, and when your agent does a good job for you, stick with that agent.