Buyers should hire a real estate agent as soon as they have a mortgage pre-approval letter and before touring a single home. Sellers should hire a listing agent before spending money on repairs, staging, or pricing decisions. That’s the short version of when to get a realtor for buying or selling a home, and the timing matters more now than it used to, because since August 2024 buyers are required to sign a written agreement with their agent before stepping into any showing.
When Buyers Should Hire an Agent
Get pre-approved first, then call an agent. In that order, and before you open Zillow for anything more than casual browsing.
Pre-approval sets your price ceiling and signals to sellers that you can actually close, so it has to come first. But once you know what you can spend, the next step is an agent rather than a weekend of open houses. An agent who works your target neighborhoods can point you toward listings that fit your priorities and warn you off ones with problems the photos hide. They also read local inventory patterns, like how fast homes are going under contract, which tells you how aggressive your offers need to be. Starting without that guidance usually means weeks of wasted tours followed by a scramble when something good finally appears.
The other reason to lock in the relationship early is procedural: you cannot tour a home with a buyer’s agent, in person or on a live virtual walkthrough, without a signed written agreement in place. That’s not a formality you want to handle on a seller’s doorstep five minutes before a showing.
The Written Buyer Agreement You Have to Sign First
As of August 17, 2024, anyone working with a buyer’s agent must sign a written buyer agreement before touring a home. The rule came out of the National Association of Realtors settlement and changed how buyer-agent compensation gets handled.
The agreement has to spell out a few specific things:
- Compensation amount. The fee must be a specific, objective number or rate rather than an open-ended range. It can be a flat fee, an hourly rate, a percentage, or zero.
- Fee cap. The agent cannot collect compensation from any source exceeding the agreed amount.
- Negotiability disclosure. The agreement must state that commissions are not set by law and are fully negotiable.
- Duration. You and the agent decide how long the agreement runs, whether that’s a single house, a month, or the whole search.
Every piece of this is negotiable. If the proposed commission looks high, say so. If you want a short trial period before committing to a longer term, ask for one. The whole point of the settlement was to force these conversations into the open rather than letting them sit buried in paperwork at closing.
One update worth knowing about: starting in 2026, an agent who receives compensation from more than one party in a transaction must disclose that to their client and get informed consent. They are no longer required to disclose the contents of a buyer-broker agreement to the seller’s side.1National Association of REALTORS®. 2026 Summary of Key Professional Standards Changes
Because the agreement locks in both money and duration, you want to read it carefully and ask whatever questions you need to before you sign. Interview more than one agent if you aren’t sure. Once the document is signed, you’re committed to the terms you accepted, so the moment to push back on anything is before pen hits paper, not after.
When Sellers Should Hire a Listing Agent
Sellers get the most out of an agent by bringing one in before any renovation, staging, or pricing decisions. A frequent mistake is dropping thousands on kitchen upgrades that don’t move the needle, or skipping a $200 fix that every buyer will flag the moment they walk in. An agent who knows your local market can tell you which improvements return their cost and which don’t.
Pricing is the other reason to hire early. Your agent’s first serious deliverable is a comparative market analysis, which pulls recent sale prices for comparable homes nearby and gives you a benchmark grounded in what buyers have actually paid. Price too high and the listing goes stale; price too low and you leave money behind. That work happens before the listing goes live, which means it has to happen before you’ve committed to a number in your own head.
The formal relationship starts with a listing agreement, a contract that gives the agent authority to market the property and establishes the sale price.2National Association of REALTORS®. Consumer Guide: Listing Agreements As with buyer agreements, the terms are negotiable, including the commission rate, the duration of the listing, and what happens if you find a buyer on your own.
Disclosures Your Listing Agent Will Walk You Through
Before signing a listing agreement, you’ll want an agent who can walk you through two obligations that regularly catch sellers who try to handle a sale alone.
The first is the property disclosure statement, which covers known defects in the home. Withholding information about problems you’re aware of can expose you to legal liability after the sale closes.3National Association of REALTORS®. Consumer Guide: Seller Disclosures An agent who handles sales in your state knows the specific form and what has to be reported.
The second applies if your home was built before 1978. Federal law requires you to disclose any known lead-based paint hazards and give the buyer a 10-day window to conduct a lead inspection before they’re bound by the contract.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC Ch. 63A – Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction That inspection window has to be built into the transaction schedule from the start, which is another reason to have the agent on board before the listing goes active.
Your agent also handles the agency disclosure process, which every state requires in some form. The disclosure explains who the agent represents and what duties they owe. This matters most in dual agency situations, where a single broker represents both buyer and seller. Roughly eight states ban dual agency outright because of the conflict of interest involved; in the rest, the written disclosure is your main protection. Read it carefully and ask questions if anything about who the agent actually works for is unclear.
What Pre-Approval Actually Involves
Since pre-approval drives the buyer’s timeline, it helps to know what the lender is doing while you wait. It’s more than a credit check. The lender verifies your income using IRS Form 4506-C, which authorizes them to pull your tax transcripts directly from the IRS through the Income Verification Express Service.5Internal Revenue Service. Form 4506-C IVES Request for Transcript of Tax Return They then compare those transcripts against the income documents you provided, a step Fannie Mae considers critical to loan quality.6Fannie Mae. Successfully Executing IRS Form 4506-C and Reverifying Tax Transcripts
The pre-approval letter you receive at the end of that process is what sets the ceiling for your home search. Your agent uses that ceiling, along with your preferences on location, size, commute, and anything else that’s non-negotiable, to filter listings through the Multiple Listing Service. A good agent won’t just forward every listing that hits the database. They’ll track how long comparable homes are sitting and whether list prices are holding up through negotiations, which tells you whether you’re in a buyer’s or seller’s market and how to shape your offers.
When You Might Not Need an Agent
Only about 5% of homes sell without an agent, and those sales tend to cluster around manufactured homes and situations where buyer and seller already know each other. That share has fallen steadily over the years, which suggests most people find the transaction complicated enough to want professional help even with so much information available online.
A few scenarios do make going without an agent reasonable. If you’re selling to a family member at an agreed price, the negotiation is already done. If you’re an experienced investor who has closed dozens of deals, you likely know the process as well as most agents. And if you’re buying new construction directly from a builder, the builder’s sales office handles much of the paperwork, though having your own agent review the contract is still worth considering, since the builder’s representative works for the builder.
For most buyers and sellers, the deadlines, legal documents, and negotiation points packed into a typical deal make the cost of an agent easier to justify than the cost of missing a contingency deadline or signing a contract on unfavorable terms. The timing question above is really the practical one: pre-approval and then an agent for buyers, an agent before any pricing or repair decisions for sellers.