Some exclusive buyer’s agents see their job as a bit of a vocation. Rich Rosa, the co-founder of Buyers Brokers Only, has never represented a seller in his career as an agent and especially enjoys working with first-time homebuyers.
Rosa, who is also a qualified attorney, has acted on behalf of buyers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire for the past 10 years. He said: ” Of the buyer agents that I have met, I feel that as a group, they are very high quality Realtors who have dedicated themselves to a specific aspect of the business.”
Exclusive buyer’s agents better-educated, more experienced?
Rosa’s agents have an undisputed high level of education — he has a policy of only hiring attorneys as his agents and currently has 28.
Not all buyer’s agents are that well-qualified, but according to a new study by the National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents (NAEBA), exclusive buyer’s agents are, on average, more educated and more experienced than traditional real estate agents.
NAEBA carried out the survey in response to the National Association of Realtors’ DANGER report, released in 2015, which stated that the real estate industry was “saddled with a large number of part-time, untrained, unethical and/or incompetent agents. This knowledge gap threatens the credibility of the industry.”
“When the DANGER Report from N.A.R came out, I thought: ‘These are not the agents I know,'” said Kimberly Kahl, executive director of NAEBA, which represents 0.5 percent of the country’s agents.
NAEBA’s study surveyed both buyer’s agent members and non-member agents. It surveyed 430 agents and received 161 complete responses.
It found that nearly 60 percent of exclusive buyer’s agents had more than 20 years of real estate experience, while less than 1 percent had been in the business for two years or fewer.
The median respondent had 21 to 25 years of experience, while last year’s 2015 NAR Member Profile showed that the average Realtor has 12 years of experience.
Meanwhile, more 70 percent of buyer agents surveyed had earned a college degree, with the median respondent holding a bachelor’s degree. By comparison, in the 2015 NAR member profile, 30 percent of Realtors had completed a bachelor’s degree as their highest level of attainment.
NAEBA pointed out that nearly 70 percent of those surveyed had worked with both buyers and sellers before deciding to work with buyers exclusively.
“I think that exclusive buyer agents, as a whole, are advocates — they feel strongly about looking out for their clients. There are a lot of potential pitfalls out there when buying a home,” said Rosa.
