Tuesday Shorts: Presenting Buyer Brokerage Agreements

Summary

In this episode, Garrett Maroon discusses how to present buyer brokerage agreements to clients. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing your worth as an agent and charging what is standard in the industry. Garrett also shares his dialogue for explaining the buyer brokerage agreement, including the responsibilities of both the agent and the client, and how the agent gets compensated. He advises giving clients time to review the agreement and not pressuring them to sign immediately.

Takeaways

Recognize your worth as an agent and charge what is standard in the industry.
Explain the buyer brokerage agreement to clients, including their responsibilities and how the agent gets compensated.
Give clients time to review the agreement and answer any questions they may have.
Take the pressure off clients by not pressuring them to sign the agreement immediately.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Purpose of the Episode
02:45 The Importance of Overcoming Assumptions
04:11 Dialogue for Presenting the Buyer Brokerage Agreement
07:44 Leaving Time for Clients to Review the Agreement
08:06 Not Pressuring Clients to Sign Immediately
09:32 Conclusion and Encouragement to Improve

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Transcript

0:02

What's up, faithful agents. Welcome back to another Tuesday short episode. I'm Garrett Maroon. It is a pleasure to be with you today. As always, if this podcast has been an encouragement and a help to you, I hope that you will take the time right now. Pause, follow the show, leave us a five star review and a quick rating. It helps us because we want to know, is this helpful? Is this an encouragement to you? Share it with a friend. However we can serve, this is a labor of love to serve this community. We love you all. We want to serve you to help you become more excellent in your work, more excellent in your homes, and ultimately, disciple makers of Jesus, right? That's our call. So I pray that this will be an encouragement to you today as we have a quick conversation about how do we present buyer brokerage agreements. I had a conversation with somebody in my coaching group just a minute ago, and how do we actually present? a buyer brokerage agreement. I thought maybe this is a helpful thing to share with the entire community. So I'm going to share that with you today. This will be even shorter. Tuesday short episode. But first, let me get to my chat GPT joke. Funny Christian story. Let's see. One Sunday, a pastor was giving a children's sermon about the importance of being prepared for anything. He asked the kids, what would you do if Jesus came to visit our church today? One little boy shot up his hand and confidently said, I tell him to take a seat. because we already have a great sermon planned. It's just not actually funny. It's just weird. Anyways, man, again, the fact that I'm funnier than artificial intelligence, you know, makes me feel good about myself. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. Anyways, I digress. So how do we present buyer brokerage agreements? Because one of the things that I felt as I've had conversations with different agents around the country has been especially with the lawsuit that just feels like there's more tension, there's more anxiety around presenting a buyer brokerage agreement, even explaining how we get paid as agents. And so a few quick thoughts on them. We're going to dialogue for you how I actually present this to people. First and foremost, right? First and foremost, you are worth what you're charging, especially as a Christian agent. You should become excellent at what you do, right? But this is the standard. This is what we charge in the real estate industry. Now, again, I know I'm not allowed to go and talk about specific compensation. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to explain how we actually get paid. So here's my encouragement to you. You're worth whatever you're charging, right? Because this is you should charge whatever the standard is in your market or your brokers, whatever it is, you're worth what you're charging because the reality is there's a lot of agents that charge that or more that don't actually care about the client or won't put their best interest at heart. So you're worth it. Number one. Number two. There's a great book called Soundtracks by John Acuff. And his whole point is there's soundtracks going off in your head that are playing that are telling you something that you may or may not know is true, but you act on it anyway. So, for example, you know, you've got to have a lot of hard conversation. Excuse me. You've got to have a hard conversation in your head. You're just playing out over and over and over again. You assume what that person is going to say and that the conversation could be awkward or it's not going to go well or whatever it might be. You assume these things. And so therefore we put it off. because we're assuming that something bad is coming. In fact, just two days ago, my son who hates thunderstorms, he heard one boom of thunder. So he came downstairs and he was really scared. Poor little guy, really scared. So I said, trying to help him. I said, buddy, look outside. Is it doing anything? No, it had long since stopped thundering. It wasn't even raining anymore. Well, long story short, he continued to be afraid with the assumption looking ahead that a storm was coming. And so he couldn't get himself under control. His and he's a little boy, right? He's a little boy. Emotions were going crazy because he just assuming that something bad was coming. We act that way all the time. So don't assume there's going to be awkward conversation when you bring up how you get paid. OK, you're worth whatever it is that you're charging. And if you want to go become more excellent at what you do so that you can be worth what you're charging, it's OK to charge for your services. So how do you actually bring it up. So this is my actual dialogue when I'm sitting down with a buyer. So at the end of our conversation, at the end of sitting down with them in person and walking through their plans, what they want to do, getting to know them some, I asked them, excuse me, asked them questions about what they're looking for, X, Y, and Z, all that initial piece. This is how I'm going to end. So I want to wrap up today. with explaining to you what's called the buyer brokerage agreement, which is really like you'd sign with any professional. It's an engagement letter, right? When you're signing with a professional, when you would work with a lawyer, when you work with any professional, you're gonna sign some sort of engagement letter that explains what their job is, what your responsibility is, and then how we actually get paid, what the cost is going to be. So do you mind if I share that with you? And they'll say, yeah, of course. Okay, great. Let me explain to you first, when we sign this, this is us committing to one another. right? And here's what my responsibility is. So I'd walk them through whatever your particular buyer, Burger Trick Agreement says. My responsibility is to, you know, treat you fair and honestly, to show you homes, to whatever it is, right? To write contracts for you, whatever. And I'd walk them through and say, the truth is these are so basic, I'm going to go well above and beyond that. But these are my my actual obligation to you when you sign this and I sign this. Does that make sense? Yeah, cool. Makes sense. Awesome. Great. Here's what your responsibility is. So you agree again, whatever your says, you agree that You'll work only with me that you will be responsive that you will whatever you'll share with me what I need to know whatever it is that you're again agent whatever your buyer brokerage says. So that's the responsibility you guys have. Does that make sense any questions? No makes sense. Cool. Great. So here's how we get paid. So in our market we charge a standard whatever your percentages right. We charge a standard blank percent. I don't think I'm allowed to say it because of our settlement rules whatever but we charge a standard blank. percent and I would use the word standard right because it's coming off and if it's true you use it it's coming off as this is what everybody charges so I charge a standard at a blank percent and then for my market and again you got to know for years but I would say now 95 % of the time the seller is still covering this cost okay so it's unlikely that this is actually gonna fall to you but I want to be totally transparent so you know upfront how I'm actually getting compensated for the work that I'm doing for you right now 95 % of the time again the seller is gonna cover it but if they don't want you to know right up front, transparent what it would cost now. Here's how this process works. When you all send me a list of homes or I send you a list of homes that you might want to see when you say, hey, let's go see X, Y, and Z, I'm going to let you know in advance, hey, great, here's the three houses we're going to see. So you guys know this one would cost you an extra whatever the number is. This one would cost you an extra five thousand. This one wouldn't cost anything extra. And neither would this one. Right. Based on the compensation amount that the seller is willing to pay. our side of the transaction. So then you guys know upfront how much extra it might cost and you get to decide is it something you want to see or not. Does that make sense? Any questions on how we get paid or anything like that? Right. And they'll say no, probably not. Right. Now they might say, yeah, I have a couple of questions. What if we want you to reduce? What if we want you to do X, Y and Z? And the truth is, I don't have time to go into all that dialogue. I want you to make sure that you've got the main dialogues down well. Walk them through what your responsibility is. Ask if they have questions. Walk them through what their responsibility is. Ask if they have questions. Walk them through how you get compensated. Let them know the majority of the time it comes from the seller. But if it's not going to, you're going to let them know upfront before they see the home so they can make sure that that's the house they still want to see and it's worth if there is any extra cost they had to incur. You walk them through that process. Once they've gone through that process, they're going to feel pretty confident that you're being super transparent. You're being really honest with them and you're going to help them through this process. So at the end of that, always say, all right, any questions on the buyer brokerage agreement at all, how we get compensated, what your responsibility is, what my responsibility is, anything like that. No. Great. All right. Awesome. So I don't want you guys to sign this today. So agents, I close very differently. I don't want you guys to sign this today. Right now, I think we would be a great fit and I would love to serve you and your family. And I think you guys would love working with me and I'd love to get to know you guys. However, I always want people to feel really confident about what they're doing. And you guys feel in no way for them to you guys feel in no way pressured or anything like that from me to go ahead and sign a document. Right. I'm going to leave this with you guys. I want you to look over it. Excuse me. I want you guys to look it over. and any questions you have or whatever. Fantastic, we'll answer those and I'll give you a call tomorrow. If you have questions, great, we'll talk about it. If you feel good about it, fantastic. I can send it over for you guys to sign and we can get started, but I want you guys to feel really good about it. So why don't you guys go ahead and take that home and then we'll connect tomorrow. Any questions, anything you guys need. So agents, that's how I wrap it up, right? Now, a lot of this is taking the sting away from everybody involved. You might feel uncomfortable charging that much. You gotta get better at what you're saying. you might feel uncomfortable trying to go in for the clothes, right? It was just what we're often taught. Now there's different approaches. That's okay. My personal approach is I'm going to take this thing out of it for myself and my clients. The awkwardness of saying, all right, so you guys want to sign, you know, I don't even know how to do that. I've been doing this for a long time. I've sold a lot of houses and I don't even know how to do that. So for me, it's, hey, I want you to feel confident today and tomorrow. So why don't you take the night and I'll give you a shout tomorrow. And that that has always worked. So agents, this is about becoming better and more excellent at what we do. So I hope that helps as an approach for you to talk about the buyer brokerage agreement. I hope that serves you. I hope that helps you become more excellent at what you do. See you next time.