Why you may want a buyer's agent to represent you when buying a house

if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs

Listing agents, by law, owe 100% of their allegiance and loyalty to their principal: the seller. They have to put things in the best light that will favor the seller, and while most of them won’t lie to you, they can’t point out any negatives about the property. Buyers’ reps can.

For instance, take this description for 444 Taconic Road, recently listed at $995,000 There’s one, important detail missing: its (precise) location.

Opportunity to acquire a four bedroom three bath colonial home with full basement located on 2.6 acres of lovely open land in an estate area of Greenwich. Taconic Road divides Greenwich from Stamford and the entire street is the location of a number of iconic estates in both communities. Homes on single building lots on the Stamford side range in price from over One Million Dollars to an excess of Three Million. On the Greenwich side, including homes directly across the street from the Subject property have sold for upwards of Ten Million Dollars. This particular property affords one the opportunity to renovate, add on or build new.

That’s all very nice, and I’m sure the property offers a fine bit of fescue, but “in an estate area of Greenwich” is, perhaps, even more fanciful than those listings that describe a property as being “on the Belle Haven Penninsula” when they’re outside the Belle Haven Association’s boundaries, because this particular lot is not “in” any part of Greenwich, estate area or not. It’s in Stamford, and the price of a house on the other side of the street is as irrelevant as the price of a Park Avenue penthouse.

Many, many years ago, when mail was still delivered on horseback, the Stamford and Greenwich post offices cut a deal in which the Greenwich office would deliver the mail way up in our NE, Stamford’s NW corner, and spare the Stamford horses a trek. That yielded a Greenwich “address” for a few properties on Taconic, but did not bring them into the town. It’s Stamford, not Greenwich schools up here, for instance, and Stamford, not Greenwich taxes. Beach passes are technically not granted to homeowners here, but, at least in the past, if you showed up at Town Hall with a Greenwich address, no one checked your exact location on a map. So there’s that.

Obviously, a buyer will have figured out what city he was buying land in before he parts with hard cash at the closing, but knowing from the start that a particular parcel is in low-rent Stamford and not in “a Greenwich estate area” might save some time during a house search.