Changes to Listing Contracts
and Buyer Agency Contracts
by Henry “Hank” Lerner, Esq.
Member and Legal Services Director
Pennsylvania Association of REALTORS®
The January issue of The Pennsylvania REALTOR® contained an article explaining two changes to the NAR Code of Ethics that would affect PAR’s listing contracts and buyer agency contracts. Since that time, five forms have been altered to bring them in line with the changes made to the Code.
Listing Contracts
Both the residential and commercial listing contracts (Form XLS and Form XLS-C) have been altered to reflect the new requirements of Standard of Practice 1-15, that where a listing broker has permission to disclose the existence of other offers she must also disclose information about the source of the offers. (See paragraph 19 of Form XLS and paragraph 16 of Form XLS-C for the specific language.) Both are already available for purchase and should have been posted by PAR’s electronic forms vendors.
Buyer Agency Contacts
Standard of Practice 1-13 now requires that buyer agents inform sellers that information presented in their offers might not be held confidential by sellers. Although it is not required that the disclosure be in writing, PAR has elected to add that language to our buyer agency contracts. These forms include the Business Relationship form (Form BR), Commercial Exclusive Buyer/Tenant Agency Agreement (Form BR-C) and the Non-Exclusive Buyer Agency form (Form NBA). Revisions to Form BR (paragraph 9) and Form NBA (paragraph 5) have just been released and should be available through the e-forms vendors soon. The same change to Form BR-C will be out within the next month or two.
In addition to the ethics change to Form BR, the entire form has been reformatted to 8½ x 11 sized paper to fit with the new format of all PAR Standard Forms. Along with this reformatting change, you will also see that several items that were formerly included in the Notices have been moved into the body of the form, and there have been some minor wording changes to keep this form consistent with the language in similar forms. For the most part, however, the use of Form BR will be the same as it has been.