Dual agent situation - how to proceed?

[Tami Dzenitis]

Hi all! I'm new here and very happy to have found this platform. I'm a new-ish investor with one SFH in my portfolio. It has been doing great as an STR for the last two years. I am ready to take on my first fix and flip and have seen a few properties with a realtor I really like. Today, he was showing me a property I had asked to see and he let me know he had another one coming soon that he thought would be a good fit for me. It's not listed yet, but we went and saw it and he was right - I like it a lot, and the numbers work! He said if we want to make an offer, we can do so before he lists it and hopefully circumvent it being listed at all.

If I want to make an offer on this property, how do I proceed? I have always heard of the danger of a dual agent situation and understand why it's not ideal. However, I also really like this realtor. The area I'm in is pretty rural and the majority of agents here have been in the business for decades; they don't seem to "get" the business of STRs or rehab/reselling homes. I say this because we used a different realtor to purchase our STR and it was a disaster all around - both our agent and the seller's agent didn't know what they were doing, had no worthwhile advice to offer, messed up paperwork so that it had to be done again, just a sloppy experience all around. This guy is young, hungry, and has an eye for the kind of properties that make sense as investments. I don't want to use a different agent! What's the best move?