kodokan

Yes, I expect this is the trouble When we used Cartus, we had a relo agent for a few days, who did everything - met us and talked through housing requirements, sent over possible rentals, made appointments, picked us up at our holiday villa rental, drove us out to viewings (they're mostly on a lockbox, so it's just the agent and us), did the lease paperwork, etc etc etc.

It's super easy, even if you've never rented before. Presumably someone paid our relo agent, and the realtor who was advertising the house we eventually chose to lease, but no idea who, or how much, or anything - it simply wasn't our problem.

</rant> The amount of handholding in US property transactions is absurd. When we bought our house, I tried phoning a couple of agents that were listing houses, just for a viewing, and they wouldn't even speak to me until I got a buyer's agent, and funnelled all the conversation through him. In exchange for showing us two houses, and doing a few hours of paperwork, the buyer's agent got nearly $18k! I know that technically it was the seller who paid him, not us, but it's still priced into the house. I basically paid for all his other clients, the indecisive ones who don't know how to use the internet properly and want chauffeuring about for weeks on end before deciding to not move after all - I could quite easily have used a telephone myself, and paid a lawyer a fixed fee for paperwork.<rant>

WEBlue

We went through all this two years ago in a few northeastern states and were told that now in those states it's a legal requirement for every prospective buyer to have a separate buyer's agent representing "their" (supposed)interests. We had no relo agent, though, and were on our own trying to view likely properties.

We refused to sign the general representation contract the first buyer's agent we talked to wanted--it just seemed crazy! So we ended up signing single representation contracts on a house by house basis with a different agent in each state. If an agent actually showed us a house (maybe more than once) & did some research on it, we'd sign up with her in case we bought that particular house. That seemed fair. We did the same for leasing.