Buyer's Agent Disclosing Defects

[J Scott]

A friend of mine is looking to buy a personal residence in California (it's a hot market and most sellers refuse inspection contingencies in contracts, so buyer due diligence needs to be done upfront prior to contracting with seller).

My friend sent me an email from his agent that sounds a bit fishy to me, and I wanted feedback about whether this might be a California thing, some NAR thing or some legal thing I'm not familiar with (though I'm not looking for legal advice, of course).

Anyway, here's the relevant part of the email (note this is from the Buyer's Agent):

The big thing that strikes me as incorrect here is the part about the Buyer's Agent being required to disclose any found defects to the Listing Agent. Especially ridiculous that this buyer's agent thinks that defects communicated verbally by an inspector can/must be treated differently than defects communicated in writing.

Then again, perhaps I'm the idiot...

Is this a CA thing? Is there some law or NAR-related ethical standard I'm not familiar with? Or is the buyer's agent just smoking crack?

[Account Closed]

Both the seller and the seller's agent have a separate duty to disclose anything that would materially affect the buyer's decision to buy, with a few small exceptions. And there are statutory disclosure forms for exactly that purpose. Assuming both the seller and seller's agent aren't hiding something, it's not clear to me that they aren't in this case, they may be afraid you would come up with something that they don't know about and the ultimate buyer might not discover, if that is the case they would have to disclose your discovery, because now they know. The part about verbal disclosure being okay is nonsense, if the seller becomes aware of something negative, they need to disclose, regardless of how they came upon that knowledge.

That's my understanding anyway, having had to take that agency and ethics refresher course a bunch of time through the years.

Btw, there is a way with the CAR form to write with no contingencies and still effectively have a contingency, if you want to go down that path.