Realtor Buying Property I find instead of showing it to me

[Ross McKenzie]

Re: How can a buyer avoid the situation where his realtor buys the property that the prospective buyer (me) asks him to show me?  Said another way; Because most successful realtors are also property investors, what's to stop realtors using "buyers" to find deals for themselves.

I suppose that the answer is obvious: don't use a realtor for buying, but it's my first property, I I want to ensure that I don't miss a legal step that ends up costing me huge money - and I'm not so good at negotiating - and Realtors are necessary to determine fair market value.

This situation seems to have happened to me, whereby I found a good deal, then asked my Realtor to show it to me. Realtor said he'd set up a showing for 5 days later, to which I replied "not good enough!". I called another realtor to show it to me the next day, and found that that the property was sold. I suspected, (but cannot know), that "my" Realtor bought the property for himself as an investment, or alerted one of his preferred clients to the deal.

Many thanks.  Ross