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The Buyer's Agent Who Splits Their Loyalty Between You and the Seller You find a house on Zillow, tap the little "Contact Agent" button, and someone cal...
You find a house on Zillow, tap the little "Contact Agent" button, and someone calls you back within the hour ready to show it that afternoon. Feels efficient. What most buyers don't realize in that moment is that the friendly voice on the phone is the listing agent, the person the seller hired to get the highest price and the cleanest terms possible. If you keep working with them to buy that house, one agent is now standing in the middle of a negotiation with a foot on each side.
That's the setup we want to talk through, because it happens constantly in Nashville, and it's rarely explained to buyers before they're already in it.
Tennessee recognizes a few different ways an agent can work with you, and the labels matter more than they sound. When one agent or one brokerage represents both the buyer and the seller in the same transaction, that's dual agency, or in a lot of real cases what's called designated agency, where two agents at the same firm each take one side. There's also something called a "facilitator" or "transaction broker," which is an agent who helps the deal move along but doesn't fully advocate for either party.
Here's the part that trips people up. A buyer's agent who owes you full fiduciary duty is supposed to negotiate hard on your behalf, tell you if they think you're overpaying, and dig into everything the seller might not want you to know. The second that same agent also owes duties to the seller, that advocacy gets diluted by law. They can't push aggressively for you at the seller's expense, because they've also promised to look out for the seller. It's not that they're being sneaky. It's that the arrangement itself caps how far they can go for you.
The Tennessee Real Estate Commission requires agents to disclose their agency relationship, and it's worth actually reading that form instead of initialing it on autopilot. The Tennessee Real Estate Commission's licensee resources lay out the different relationship types, and understanding which one you're in changes what you can reasonably expect your agent to do for you.
The pull toward the listing agent is understandable. They already know the house cold. They can get you in the door fast, which in a competitive East Nashville or Germantown situation feels like an edge. And there's a persistent belief floating around that if you use the listing agent, you'll get a "deal" because the seller only pays one commission instead of two.
That last part is where we'd push back the hardest. The commission structure is negotiated between the seller and the listing brokerage before you ever walk in. Whether that saving gets passed to you as a lower price is entirely up to the seller, who has zero obligation to hand it over, and whose agent, remember, is trying to get them the most money. The convenience is real. The discount is mostly a story people tell themselves.
What you actually give up is the person whose only job is to find the problems. When you tour a 1940s bungalow in Inglewood and the crawlspace smells a little off, you want an agent who says "let's get that inspected before we write anything and structure the offer around what we find." A dual agent can flag it, but they can't strategize against the seller with it, because the seller is also their client. The advocacy that protects you in the gray areas is exactly the advocacy that gets neutered.
Buying a home is a long series of small negotiations, not one big handshake. Each one is a place where whose side your agent is on actually shows.
Price and terms is the obvious one, but the real use often lives in the details after the inspection. Say the report comes back with a failing HVAC system and some knob-and-tube wiring in an older Nashville home. An agent working only for you sits down and builds the case for a repair credit or a price reduction, knowing your walk-away number and using it. An agent who also represents the seller has to thread a needle between your interest in a credit and the seller's interest in not giving one. Same facts, very different outcome depending on who's in your corner.
Appraisal gaps, contingency decisions, timelines, what to disclose and when, how hard to hold the line when the other side gets tense. All of it bends around loyalty. This is the whole reason buyer representation exists as a separate thing, and it's the pillar our practice is built on. When we represent you, we represent you, full stop. We're not carrying the seller's interests in the same conversation, so nothing we tell you is hedged by a duty we owe someone across the table.
You don't need to become a licensing expert. You need to ask a few plain questions early, before you've fallen for a house and lost your use.
Ask any agent you're considering, straight out: are you representing me, or are you the listing agent for this property? If you show me a home you have listed, what happens to your loyalty to me? Would you ever act as a dual agent in my deal, and if so, will you tell me before it happens or after? A good answer is direct and unhurried. If the response gets vague or reassures you without actually explaining the relationship, that vagueness is your answer.
The cleanest position for a buyer, especially anyone thinking about a home as a long-term asset and not just a place to live, is to line up your own representation before you start touring. Have someone in your corner from the first showing, so that by the time you're negotiating in the heat of a Nashville summer market, there's no question about whose interests are being protected. Yours. Only yours.
That clarity is the whole point, and it's not something you can add back in once the negotiation is already underway.