As has also been said, a seller's agent works for the seller. A buyer's agent works for the buyer. It is in the agent's interest to make a sale. If her agent isn't working to get the price that Betty wants to pay, the agent makes $0 because Betty doesn't buy the house. No matter what, Betty is the one in control. If the agent isn't working in her interest, the agent doesn't get a sale, the agent doesn't get a comission.

I guess I just operated differently, then. I always considered getting my clients the best deal was in my best interest.

edit: What GD said.

I'm sure there are agents that are just trying to get you to pay the highest they can get you to. In which case, it should be pretty obvious. If an agent is trying to get you to pay more than you want to pay...dump them.

Yeah, that's written into the paperwork too. They have a certain length of time to get the HOA info to you, and you have a certain length of time by which you have to approve of the HOA info and remove that contingency.

The main reason it's there is that if the HOA is not handling its finances well, that could have a serious, major impact on your property value and your personal finances. So you wanna take that seriously.

I didn't throughly read the other posts, so sorry if I repeat.

You can look on http://www.realtor.com/ to see what kind of houses you like and what different houses in your price range feature. You may also find specific houses you want to look at prior to meeting with your agent.

Don't be distracted by the seller's personal style. Is the house truly awesome or does the owner just have awesome taste in furnishings?

Look at little inconsequential things that might bug you down the road. For instance, half of the rooms on our house have wall vents that are off center. I know that sounds minor but a lot of furniture and pictures look off center because of it. It drives me nuts!

Ask for utility costs for the prior year. A "great deal" might not be so great if you have to pay loads more in one house than a slightly more expensive but similar house.

Don't get discouraged and don't go look when you're in a bad mood.

I know this has little to do with dealing with realtors, banks, etc; but has more to do with tips on considering what house or unit to buy, so if you're not interested in that, just skip this:

Before John and I rented our house, we asked the owners if we could take room measurements BEFORE we considered renting the unit. It took us only about an hour. I think the landlord liked that because it showed them we were dead serious. Being a retired architect and us having specific furniture that we wanted to accomodate, we wanted to guarantee that all of our most important pieces would fit properly before we took the contract.

We noted the room sizes, locations and sizes of windows and doors, closet spaces, ceiling and wall fixtures, appliances, hook-ups and electrical outlets. We even drew elevations and took measurements of kitchen cabinets. We had set specific "deal breaking" requirements for total home square footage, storage space and usable kitchen countertop surface and kitchen storage capacity. Before we even signed a rental contract, we had placed all our furniture onto a Autosketch floor plan.

As an architect, I'm also acutely aware of things such as house/room orientation. Which rooms are going to really heat up in the summer? Which are going to be the hardest to cool? Which are going to be too dark, too cold, etc? How are the windows laid out, so if the a/c breaks down or if central air is too pricey, how will the house cool off best "passively"? Are windows double-glazed, etc? Energy costs over the long run of home ownership can be enormous!

Another reason to lay out the rooms is to find out storage capability. How much square footage do you have for all your clothes and junk? At the time, we even had measured the amount of our current clothes space and set a requirement for the house we rented. Guess what? Even having done that we STILL put extra clothes out in our now "unusable" two-car garage.

Do not forget light fixtures, electrical outlets, appliances and hook-ups. In this Energy and Technological Age, these things can really impact your lifestyle, if those items are missing from your home or are poorly located.

All of this was only for a rental. If I'm going to be BUYING something, I'm certainly going to go through AT LEAST all of that, if not more.

The best are going to think longterm and repeat business and referral. I have no doubt that the realtors at LoT are among those.

Do a Megan's law search and find out what your prospective neighbors are into that might annoy you.

My sense in this market is that seller's agents are not going to assist their clients in holding out for some mythical highest offer. The agent only gets 3% of any difference and probably won't want to spend much time chasing after that.

I also found the HOA minutes useful. A great way to see if there are any problems. Mine were farily ordinary and it seemed most improvements got approved. I also second Morri's looking around at other units to see how strict the HOA is. Mine seems fairly lax judging by everyone's patios.

Repairs - as others have said you have to pick and choose. I knew we wanted to repaint for instance so no use hassling about any of that. There are some repairs that are building code - I'm not sure if they HAVE to fix them but we did get them to fix those (an earthquake strap was in the wrong place on the water heater). I also compromised some as well. There is some dry rot on my patio doors. I got a $600 concession toward repair of that, it's not the full cost but it's part of it.

And I also second checking out the neighborhood at different times. My complex has absolutely no guest parking. Guests have to park on the street. The issue is it's a cul de sac so not so many spaces and there is a Church across the street. So Saturday around 5 and Sunday mornings - parking bites. The rest of the time it's not too bad. Luckily for me, well maybe not lucky, Madzers dad lives in the apartments that share the cul de sac. So I've been there at all kinds of various times dropping her off and picking her up so I knew exactly how the parking worked.

I had a really good Real Estate agent. I made an offer $40K less than it was priced at. We ended up at $20K less and it appraised for 5K more than I paid so I'm pretty happy with that. The other thing that's been wonderful with my Agent is she has a ton of contacts. I've only owned for a little over a week and I've already had it all painted, new celing fans installed, light fixtures and the dry rot door guy is coming next week. All arranged through my realtors contacts. And a friend's hubby does construction work and says I've gotten a killer deal price wise on getting this all done.