05/30/2025
Consumer to Consumer
by PW
Business to business operations are not hard to understand. We all know that Intel chips are primarily supplied to other businesses rather than directly to consumers. Similarly, everyone is familiar with business to consumer operations, like Target or Coca Cola. And anyone who has visited Craig’s List or Facebook Marketplace knows that those places are where regular people post things that they want to sell to other regular people, which is consumer to consumer.
Consumer to consumer is often the cheapest and messiest place to conduct a transaction of any kind. There are stories going back decades of people getting caught in the most bizarre situations as a result of answering a classified ad. Whenever you deal with the general public, every possible iteration of humankind comes into play. And when it’s just you, a classified ad and a stranger on the other line, there is no protection from all the many pitfalls that you may encounter. People are anxious. People are greedy. People are aggressive. And sometimes they’re just plain weird.
Residential real estate is a consumer to consumer business. Even commercial real estate, despite having commercial in the name, can be a consumer to consumer transaction when neither business is in the business of real estate. When you’re buying or selling a house, you are the consumer and the person on the other side of the transaction is also the consumer.
There are many professionals that will come into play in any real estate transaction, lawyers, title search companies, licensed inspectors, bank appraisers, etc. But none of those people are required for every step of the process. In fact, due to the timing and costs involved, most of those professionals are desired for only short periods of time, just long enough to get the job done at a reasonable cost.
Which means that the only professional you will deal with on a regular basis throughout your real estate journey is your real estate agent. *Your* real estate agent. Agents come in all shapes, sizes and ability levels. Experience in real estate is important, but so is life experience. In fact, there are precious few real estate transactions that don’t have a deeply emotional component to them. Your agent should have the emotional maturity to understand your needs and put them first. And that kind of emotional maturity is a rare commodity in these crazy times.
An agent is an advisor, a confidante, an advocate and a voice of reason when needed. Whether it’s the most expensive transaction of your life or not, it’s still a lot of money on the line. And it’s always a consumer to consumer transaction. You want and need at least one licensed professional on your side all the way through. The old saying is, “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.” The same is true in real estate. The best agents I know get other agents to sell their own houses.
Don’t go it alone. It’s not as easy as reality TV makes it look.
