Recently, my girlfriend and I were house shopping and we decided to make an offer on a home in Atlanta. It was advertised for $446,000, but we thought we could get a better deal by contacting the seller's agent first. It wasn't the first time we tried this trick, we had previously bought our house in Fresno with only one real estate agent, and it worked out great. So we threw out a low-ball offer of $305,000 for the condo and, to our surprise, the seller's agent was very eager to work with us. He negotiated on our behalf with the seller, and basically came back and said that if we could raise our offer to $331,000 we could have the deal. There was a pending offer of $342,000 but if we wanted it at $321,000, they would convince the seller to give it to us. Why would the seller's agent go so far for us? Why would he bend over backwards to try to make the deal happen for us, when we were offering a lower price for the home, rather than a higher bidder?
I suppose, you could call the seller's real estate agent to pick you up and give you a free ride to the house to look at it too. So in that case you give up nothing. You can find all the listing of houses and the contact info of the seller's agent on www.localrealestateyellowpages.com. However, if you use a buyer's agent, you have absolutely no access to the good information.
So before you call up your co-worker's realtor friend because you're in the market, ask yourself if you'd rather make an extra 2 years of mortgage payments because you were too lazy to look on www.localrealestateyellowpages.com and drive yourself to the house