Buying and Selling Realtor Question

[was5]

Hi - I'm normally a lurker, but I have a question about buying and selling a home at the same time.

Short question - is it rude/uncommon to use 2 separate realtors when you are buying and selling within a few miles?

Long story-
We currently live in a house that's just under 1,100 square feet. We want to move to a bigger house in the same school district (or at least a reasonable distance since our district does school of choice).

I have a neighbor/fellow mom who is a fairly new realtor (in the last 3-4 years). Since she is very passionate about our neighborhood and school district, I think she'd be good at selling our house. She sold the house across the street from us last year for well above asking the first week it was listed. Then again, it's a sellers market so maybe that's not really reflective her skills as a realtor.

As a buyer, since the market is competitive I think we'll need someone to give us good advice and be a good negotiator - in my mind, that would be someone with more experience. Plus, since the inventory is low in the area we are looking at (particularly in our price range which is the low end of that neighborhood) having a realtor with good connections might help us on our search.

My concern on the flip side is that a realtor who deals with the more expensive neighborhood wouldn't see the same value in my current home and wouldn't work as hard to sell it.

Any words of advice?

[expectantsteelerfan]

What is the timing for buying and selling? If you are planning on waiting to list your current house until you've closed on your new house, I feel like that would not be an issue. Or if you are selling 1st and moving into temporary housing while you look, that doesn't seem like it would be an issue either. BUT if you are planning to look and make an offer on a new house contingent on selling your current house, that seems like it would be complicated and icky to use 2 different realtors.

I bought and sold this summer in the same community. I picked a realtor who was an acquaintance who I know is VERY familiar with our district. She's only been a realtor for a few years, and she really focused on our district when starting out (she is branching out to other areas now) and has really showed that she will hustle to get stuff sold. We were upgrading in houses...the house we bought is over 3x the cost of the house we sold. She was really knowledgeable and helpful when we needed to increase our pre-approval in a weekend to get an offer in on a house that was above our price range (we still lost out on that one). But she was also really knowledgeable and helpful in finding us workers to get our old house updated and ready for the market. I know I would have felt bad giving half my business to someone else after she had helped us so much, but I'm guessing if you use a realtor you don't personally know it's not as big of a deal.

BUT there was a thread in the past year about someone using a friend as a realtor who was just starting out trying to 'help them out' and they dropped the ball on photos and other stuff, so the poster regretted using them if I recall correctly.

I would not let friendship sway you and go with whatever realtor you think will be best for you!

[Susie]

I don't know that it would be "rude," but unusual.  I think it depends somewhat on timing like expectantsteelerfan mentioned.  It would make a statement, and probably not a positive one, if the processes were concurrent/overlapping and you were not using the same agent for both.

We made a similar distance move last year (3 miles, same school district, needed more space).  The processes were overlapping, first we went under contract on our purchase, then listed ours for sale and accepted a contract, then closed on the purchase, and a month later closed on our sale.  It really helped to have one realtor involved with all of the moving parts.  It was also less expensive; she did our sale for 5% instead of the usual 6% because she also handled our purchase and was receiving a buyer's agent commission on our purchase.  She also advised us on how best to list our house, timing for marketing, etc. based on our purchase timeline, and also on our purchase offer with knowledge of what our sale constraints would be.  

It didn't really occur to me that a realtor would be more invested in/knowledgable about the price point of the purchase vs. sale.  Our realtor lives in our town, their office is in our town, and our town is kind of their agency's bread & butter.  It isn't really a big enough market that I was worried she'd only be super into one slice of it.  

[boiler717]

I think it is a bit unusual but we did it. I think a realtor that can handle you as a buyer can handle the sale, and will likely reduce your commission for doing both.
We chose 2 different ones because we were buying and selling in 2 different areas. We needed a realtor for our sale that knew the suburbs and the different new construction builders (we had a custom home in a predominantly production neighborhood and needed someone who could fight the appraisal for us). We weee buying in a historic neighborhood and needed a buyers agent who knew old house issues. We went with 2 separate agents because we did not find someone who knew both well.

[purplepenguin7]

I attempted to do this recently and it didn't really work out. We were buying about 30 mins from where we currently lived and I wanted a realtor in the area we were buying as someone familar with area. I also lived in a townhouse community and wanted to us a neighboorhood realtor (we weren't friends) because she was very familar with the community and I also thought maybe she'd already have buyers interested that had lost other units in the community or know of people looking to get in. We had been already working with a realtor to buy a house and I guess she was under the impression that she was going to sell ours (she knew that we already owned something). She blew up at me when I told her I had other intentions for selling the house, which was like strike 47 of working with her. I ended up cutting ties with that relationship for several reasons. We proceeded with the sale with the neighboorhood realtor and looked for a buyers agent in the new area but our selling agent cut us a deal to be our buying agent as well. In the end, we didn't really need a "local" realtor to buy and it saved us money and time/effort in the long run. I also spend about a thousand hours on the phone with the two transactions and it was nice just to have one person that knew both sides. All that being said, the realtor did use was experienced and also not a personal contact. I would be hestiant to use an acquantance/friend with little experience, but at the same time if she's been selling houses during COVID she probably does have experiences getting bids through in this market.

Oh and also, I wouldn't worry about an agent not working hard at your sale price point.  If they agree to be your agent, they will want the comission and the sale to go through period.  I would instead ask your intended realtor about their current client load and how many houses they sold last year. While you want an experienced realtor, you also don't want someone who has like 5+ houses on the market at once because their attention will be spread thin. 

[was5]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. We are going to try and sell almost simultaneously - I want to at least have our house on the market before we make an offer on anything, but I think it does make sense to use one realtor for both. We will mostly likely use a realtor who specializes in our area not the neighbor. She lives here but most of her listings and her office are for a further-out suburb.

[scout8]

Rael estate broker here. It's not typical, but it's fine. Just make sure to be clear about your plans with both agents.