Do I really need a REALTOR® to buy a home in Vancouver?
Not every buyer needs the same thing from a REALTOR®.
Access to listings is only one small part of buyer representation. The more useful question is what information, analysis, negotiation, and transaction support you need to make the purchase with confidence.
A good buyer relationship should help you understand the property, its context, the transaction, and the trade-offs involved. It should also leave room for the answer to be that this one is not for you.
Why the answer is not always the same
Buyers arrive with different experience, timelines, and tolerance for sorting the information themselves. A person who has bought in Greater Vancouver before is not in the same position as someone buying a first home, or buying from another city.
The property changes the work too. A house and a strata condo do not raise the same questions, even when the purchase price looks similar.
What changes the answer
What you need from representation depends on how much of the property, the building or the house, the comparable sales, the offer, and the conditions you want to examine with someone else.
It also depends on whether you want help comparing alternatives, including the possibility of walking away.
What I would examine with a buyer
With a buyer, the work starts from the objective: what the home has to do, on what timeline, and what would make a property a poor fit.
From there we look at the property in front of us, the context around it, and the trade-offs in the offer. The client decides whether to proceed.