As an investor, what should I expect from a good realtor?

[Dan Benjamin]

I'm in the process of evaluating properties for my first real estate investment. I haven't worked with an agent before (not even when I purchased my home) and am not totally clear on the value I should be expecting from them nor how to be sure that they are actually acting in my best interests.

To make this post more coherent I'll ask specific questions, using as an example the one agent that I'm working with right now (selected on the virtue of (a) claiming to be experienced in working with investors and (b) being the only one to send me properties in their area when asked).

1. After a conversation about what I was looking for, I asked him to recommend some properties in his area. Instead he just sent me all of the MLS listings for nearby multifamily homes. I'm not bothered much by this, but if it's par for the course that an agent would add some insight at this stage I'd like to know that that's the case.

2. When discussing numbers, I noted that many of these homes were priced higher per square foot than recent sales in the area. He told me that price/sqft was not relevant to investment purchases and that a fair price would be determined by the cap rate. Similarly when I asked him how we might go about calculating an offer price for a given property he said I should just look at the list price and either offer there if I liked the cap rate or move on if not. (These are properties that have been on the market 3-12 months, so I'm not worried that they are about to sell at list.) Are these reasonable positions to take? He has far more expertise in this area than I do, but the paranoid part of me worries that a buyer's agent has a natural incentive to steer a buyer toward a quicker sale rather than negotiations. I understand there is some obligation toward fiduciary duty here but that seems fairly unenforceable.

3. Lastly, I'd like to know in general what an investor should expect from their agent to justify using one at all. At least so far, at this early stage he hasn't done anything that I couldn't have done myself. Past this point, the only thing I can think of is that he might have further opinions about a property when seeing the interior but not having done this before I'm not even sure what that would look like.

As an aside, I don't mean to come off as distrustful of realtors or suggest that the one I'm working with is doing a bad job. I'm just at a significant information disadvantage here and would like to learn from people who know more about this process than I do before investing a significant portion of my savings.