Your Trusted Real Estate Advisor

Builders are selling their own products, the properties they own. Therefore they can have their attorneys design their sales contracts. Those contracts are, naturally, designed primarily to protect the builder’s interests.

Realtors® sell someone else’s home, not their own products. The contracts we must use have been designed by the Colorado Real Estate Commission. They are designed to balance the competing interests of the Buyer and the Seller. The Realtor® is involved in the transaction as a broker (usually as an agent for one of the parties), but is not a party to the contract.

That’s the major difference between buying a home from the builder’s sales representative without an agent representing you and buying that same home with an agent on your side. When I am an agent for a client buying a new home, I know what the Commission-approved contract does to balance the needs of both parties. So I know what to look for in the builder’s contract that might give more weight to the builder’s needs than the buyer’s.

Most of the time there isn’t much one can do to change the builder’s contract. You either buy their home using their contract, or you don’t buy it at all. However, I am able to help my clients understand what they are getting into, to ask questions they wouldn’t know to ask, and to prompt the sales representative to explain something that they just said. I know most of my clients don’t work with real estate contracts daily, and their eyes get that blank stare as the contract is explained to them.

I was surprised to hear from one builder’s sales representative how rare it was that I was there with my clients as she went over the contract with them. She said almost all of the agents who bring their clients in to buy a new home take do not stay while she prepares and goes through the paperwork. They still expect to be paid, but they don’t want to take the time to stay with their clients through this critical time.

In addition to considering it my fiduciary duty as my client’s agent, I’ve found it is very helpful that I’m there, even if I don’t have to say anything. My clients hear some of what is said (almost like hearing a foreign language), process it as well as they can, and look to me for a signal that it’s OK to sign the form.

If you plan to buy a new home from a builder, and you have an agent (which you have seen is recommended), that agent should be with you at contract time, at the “orientation walkthrough”, at closing, and at any time you have a problem with any aspect of the building process. Builders pay us to bring you in to be their customer. Our clients choose us to be their agent and to represent them, guiding them through a very stressful and confusing time. Insist that your agent does his or her job.