Eight thousand four hundred dollars. A listing agent named Corinne slid a yellow sticky note across her desk at 4:15 on a Tuesday in January with that number on it, her offer to run both sides of our duplex purchase and hand the buyer's 3 percent commission back to us as a credit at closing. I sat in her brokerage office on Center Street with my work lanyard still around my neck and my husband Theo beside me doing the multiplication on his phone. Three percent of $280,000. We had no agent. The note was the whole pitch.
Here were our actual stakes that January: $42,000 in savings, two W-2 jobs, one plan to house-hack, meaning live in the lower unit of the duplex and rent the upper to cover most of the payment. Rents for the upper unit ran $1,150 in that zip code, and our budget only closed if we landed within about $5,000 of asking. A buyer's agent at 3 percent would not have come outta our pocket directly, but sellers price commissions in, and Corinne's pitch was that cutting the buyer side out made our offer cleaner and cheaper for a seller whose house had already sat 94 days. I chewed on that number all the way home.
We took the sticky note. The credit landed on our closing disclosure exactly as promised, $8,400, the deal closed in 31 days, and for about nine weeks I told the story like we had gamed the system. Then in April I paid $17 for a C.L.U.E. insurance claims report on the property, pieced together a $4,700 water damage claim from 2023 that nobody had noted, and began writing the three questions I should have asked before I touched that note. Not from her. From a report I bought myself. The questions are taped inside a kitchen cabinet now.
the sticky note with one number
The mechanics, cuz nobody clarified 'em to us that day either: the seller was paying a 6 percent total commission, 3 percent per side, and by representing us as well under a dual agency agreement Corinne would give up half her payday, and the seller agreed to pass that 3 percent to us as a closing credit. The list price was $289,900, we settled at $280,000 with the credit on top, and the seller's net barely moved cuz his commission bill shrank by the same amount. Everyone at that table could do this math. That was the entire trade, speed and certainty sold at a discount, and the discount was real.
the form nobody explained
The dual agency consent form ran two pages, and the operative sentence was this one: "the fiduciary duties of loyalty and full disclosure are modified." I initialed it in about eleven seconds. What modified means, I absorbed later, is that Corinne legally could not advise either side against the other, could not tell us the seller's bottom line even tho she knew it to the dollar, and could not carry a bad fact across the aisle even if carrying it helped us. The boundary is the job. Nobody read that sentence out loud at the closing table, and I have opinions about that now.
what 3 percent bought and didn't
Credit where due: Corinne was fast and good at the machinery. Offer drafted the same night, inspection scheduled inside six days, title work turned around in two weeks, closing in 31 days from acceptance, and she caught a real problem in the title commitment, a utility easement nobody had mapped, and got it corrected before it became our problem. The 3 percent bought competence at transaction speed. What it did not buy was anybody whose job was to be suspicious on our side of the table, and it took me two months to understand that those are different jobs.
the inspection scheduled in six days
The inspector found missing GFCI outlets in both bathrooms, a water heater from 2009, and a furnace from 1998, and the seller credited us $650 at closing, which felt like winning somethin' at the time. Six days was fast cuz Corinne wanted velocity, and velocity was the product we reckoned we were buying. A 1961 duplex deserves slower looking than that. The crawl space got four minutes, and I think about those four minutes more than I think about the $8,400.
question one: whose phone rings first
The three questions, taped inside the cabinet where I keep the cereal: When you learn somethin' bad about the house from the seller, what do you do with it? Who in this deal is paid to be suspicious of the other side? What happens to my $8,400 when your two clients' interests collide? I asked Corinne the first one in April, two weeks after the C.L.U.E. report, and she said, to her credit, "I tell you what I'm allowed to tell you." I sat with that sentence for a while. It is the whole structure of dual agency, printed slight, and it was on page one of the form I initialed in eleven seconds.
the $17 report that knew too much
The C.L.U.E. report from LexisNexis listed one claim: February 2023, $4,700 paid, water damage, cause of loss described as a bathroom supply line failure. The seller's disclosure form, which we had signed at closing, said no water intrusion in the past five years. Asked directly, Corinne said the seller told her it was a modest sink leak, professionally repaired, and that the claim predated her listing so it never crossed her desk. Maybe that is within the lines. It does not feel like it. We spent $310 replacing every supply line in the building anyways, and I sleep fine about that $310.
the $1,150 renter upstairs
Marcus moved into the upper unit on March 1 at $1,150. The mortgage runs $1,710 a month at 6.875 percent, so our net cost is $560 before taxes and insurance, and the duplex math keeps me from rage-spiraling about a $4,700 claim I absorbed about from a report that costs $17. March rent arrived on the first. April rent arrived on the first. Marcus fixes his own disposal. The machine works, and the machine is the reason I am not angrier than I am.
the list inside the cabinet
The sticky note is still in my desk drawer, faded, $8,400 in Corinne's looping handwriting, and I keep it the way you keep a receipt for a thing that worked and cost more than the price. Would I sign that note again? On a new build with a builder warranty, prolly, cuz there is less in the walls for a modified fiduciary to modify around. On a 1961 duplex with a crawl space, never twice. The saved 3 percent was real money. The unasked questions were real money too, $4,700 shaped, and only one of them was printed on a sticky note. That is it. That is the whole list.
