Is your purchase offer information confidential?

On my "Real" blog, I'm switching formats and going to a WordPress platform and getting away from my more website-like blog.  It's a slow process but while I'm switching I thought I'd post some of my archived postings from months and years past that may be helpful or at least information. This is one of those posts . . . .

Is your purchase offer information confidential?  Well, yes and no.
If you are a buyer who, through your Realtor representing you and only you exclusively, makes an offer on a property, do you have the expectation of confidentiality regarding that offer's contents?

• --From your Realtor, yes, absolutely. Your Realtor owes you the duty of confidentiality and she may not tell others in her office or neighbors any information about your transaction without your permission.
• --From the Listing (the one selling the house who works exclusively for the seller) Realtor, no not really. This Realtor owes you (the buyer) nothing, no duty of confidentiality, no accountability, no obedience. He represents the seller and it is his duty to look out for the seller's best interests.

Therefore, and only with the seller's permission, he can tell another competing Buyer Representive Realtor the terms and conditions of your offer at his discretion--thereby setting off a bidding war among two interested parties.
Many people make the mistake of thinking anything that has to do with a contract must be kept confidential and won't be made available to competing buyers. A good Realtor will counsel their clients effectively and tell them this information. In fact, the Ohio Association of Realtors will make it mandatory to tell their clients that there is no expectation of privacy beginning January 1, 2006.

It gets murkier though.

What if the Realtor exclusively representing the seller is also the Realtor representing the buyer and there is a competitive situation? Let's say it's a hot property and everyone and their brother wants to buy it --- a great part of town, it'd been undervalued to move quickly, it's a foreclosure, etc.

With the seller's permission, and that is very important, the Listing Realtor can reveal the terms and conditions to other parties. If that same Realtor is representing a potential buyer, he can tell that buyer all the terms and conditions of the competing offers, thus fulfilling his fiduciary duties to both the seller and buyer and making it glaringly apparent that he owes no such duties to the competing potential buyers. In this scenario, the Listing/Selling Realtor's buyer gets the property every time if he/she is willing to beat the competitive terms and conditions which they are now privy too.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005