Why Publish a Conflict Register?
A buyer should not have to guess what might influence the advice they receive.
HomeBuyer Experts uses a simple standard:
What is best for the buyer?
That standard is easier to trust when the incentives surrounding the relationship are visible too.
Our approach is:
Eliminate what we can. Neutralize what we can. Disclose what remains. Preserve the buyer’s ability to choose.
This register is intended to make common conflicts easier to see and discuss. It is not a claim that human judgment can ever be perfectly conflict-free.
Seller-Side Loyalty
Potential conflict: A brokerage that represents both buyers and sellers may face competing duties or limits on advocacy in some transactions.
HBE practice: HomeBuyer Experts is an exclusive buyer brokerage. We do not take listings and do not represent sellers.
Our only clients are buyers.
Paid Referrals From Service Providers
Potential conflict: An agent may have a financial reason to recommend a particular lender, inspector, title company, contractor, home-warranty provider, or other service provider.
HBE practice: HBE does not accept referral compensation, kickbacks, gifts, marketing payments, or other things of value from these providers in exchange for sending buyers their business.
When we suggest a provider, the recommendation should stand on its usefulness to the buyer — not on what HBE receives in return.
You remain free to choose your own provider.
Broker-to-Broker Referrals
Potential conflict: Real-estate brokerages may sometimes compensate one another for licensed brokerage referral work.
HBE practice: If HBE ever receives a lawful broker-to-broker referral fee, that arrangement should be disclosed to the buyer before it can affect the referral.
A referral fee should never determine which professional is presented as the best fit for the buyer.
Buyer-Agent Compensation
Potential conflict: Compensation can influence behavior even when nobody intends it to.
HBE practice: Compensation is explained in writing before representation begins. Brokerage fees and commissions are negotiable. HBE’s compensation should not determine which home we recommend, how much we encourage you to spend, or whether we advise you to proceed.
We continually evaluate our compensation structure against a harder question:
Would we still recommend this if HBE earned exactly the same amount whether the buyer proceeded, renegotiated, waited, chose another home, or walked away?
During the current pilot, HBE is also tracking actual professional time and comparing alternative compensation structures internally so future compensation can be designed from evidence rather than tradition alone.
Seller or Builder Incentives
Potential conflict: A seller or builder may offer compensation or incentives that could create pressure to favor a particular transaction.
HBE practice: Those incentives are disclosed and handled according to the written buyer agreement. HBE does not treat an incentive as a reason to steer a buyer toward a property or toward closing.
The existence of an incentive does not change the North Star.
Recommendations Under Time Pressure
Potential conflict: Fast-moving markets can reward speed and momentum even when a buyer would benefit from slowing down.
HBE practice: Urgency is information, not instruction.
Our job is to help the buyer understand what is known, what remains uncertain, what could be lost by waiting, and what could be lost by rushing.
A wise decision may be to act quickly. It may also be to let the house go.
Buyer Decision Profiles
Potential conflict: Understanding how someone makes decisions could be used either to communicate more helpfully or to persuade them more effectively.
HBE practice: Buyer Decision Profiles exist to help us organize information in a way the buyer can actually use.
They are not sales psychology profiles.
HBE should not create hidden scores for likelihood to close, emotional susceptibility, objection resistance, urgency sensitivity, or similar persuasion-oriented traits.
The buyer should ultimately be able to see, correct, and update what HBE believes it understands about their decision process.
VALUE, Decision Aids and Values Clarification
Potential conflict: Advisors can unintentionally substitute their own preferences for the buyer’s values. A decision-support system can also become a disguised persuasion system if it is designed around producing a transaction instead of improving understanding.
HBE practice: VALUE stands for Values, Alternatives, Learning, Uncertainty, and Evidence.
We use structured decision aids to make options, evidence, uncertainty, tradeoffs, and consequences easier to compare. We use values-clarification questions to help buyers identify what matters before the pressure of a specific property narrows attention.
After meaningful stages and showings, VALUE is revisited so new learning can change the decision rather than merely confirm the old one.
These tools are meant to improve the quality of the buyer’s choice — not produce a predetermined answer.
Price tells you what a home costs. VALUE helps you decide what that cost means to you.
VALUE must never become a hidden purchase-probability score, persuasion profile, or substitute for the buyer’s judgment.
Technology and AI
Potential conflict: Software can make recommendations appear more objective or certain than the underlying information justifies.
HBE practice: Technology may organize evidence, surface questions, preserve a decision record, and help identify tradeoffs. It should not hide uncertainty or quietly replace the buyer’s judgment.
Human review remains part of consequential recommendations, and the final choice remains the buyer’s.
The Conflict We Cannot Eliminate Completely
HBE is a business. It must earn enough revenue to remain capable, independent, insured, secure, and available to buyers.
That creates an unavoidable tension between the cost of excellent representation and the buyer’s desire to minimize cost.
We do not solve that tension by pretending it does not exist.
We solve it by making compensation understandable, reducing outcome-based incentives where possible, measuring the work honestly, and continually asking whether the economics still support the same advice we would give if HBE’s revenue were unaffected by the buyer’s decision.
The Standard
For any material conflict, HBE’s operating sequence is:
- Eliminate it where practical.
- Neutralize or reduce it where elimination is not practical.
- Disclose it clearly enough for the buyer to understand.
- Preserve informed choice.
- Monitor it as the relationship and transaction evolve.
- Decline or withdraw if a conflict cannot be managed without compromising the buyer’s interests or HBE’s duties.
The goal is not to claim perfection.
The goal is to make it difficult for an undisclosed incentive to outrank the buyer.