---
title: "How buyers play two agents against each other and how to stop it"
description: "How Dubai buyers exploit co-broke gaps to avoid commission, and why signing the split before the client pays is the only reliable fix."
category: "disputes-settlements"
readingTime: 12
---
## The Viewing That Cost Two Agents Their Commission

Two agents — one from Agency A, one from Agency B — both show the same buyer a two-bedroom in Business Bay. The buyer likes the unit. He tells Agent A he wants to think about it. He tells Agent B the same thing. Three days later he calls the listing agent directly, says he "met you at the open house," and offers slightly below asking. The listing agent — who has never spoken to this buyer — smells a deal and agrees. Both brokers who did the actual work get nothing. The seller's paperwork is clean. The buyer pays one cheque. Nobody goes to prison. And both agents are left with a WhatsApp thread and a story they tell at every agency dinner for the next six months.

This is not a rare horror story. It is a structural problem that the Dubai market's architecture quietly enables — and understanding exactly why it happens is the first step toward stopping it.

## Why Dubai's Market Makes This Easy for Buyers

Most secondary-market listings in Dubai carry no exclusive mandate. RERA regulations permit sellers to sign Form A with a maximum of three different brokers simultaneously, each with a separate agreement, allowing sellers to maximise market exposure while maintaining control over who can advertise their property. That is reasonable from the seller's perspective, but it creates a situation where the same unit — with the same Trakheesi permit number — is being marketed by multiple agencies at the same time.

When multiple agencies hold Form A on a property, a buyer with any patience and a halfway decent WhatsApp strategy can meet the listing from several angles: a portal inquiry, a cold call from a co-broke agent, a referral. Because listings overlap, and because the buyer's introduction is rarely registered formally at the early stages, buyers have real leverage to play the field. The buyer knows what most agents do not: that whoever lands the signed Form F and the commission cheque is not necessarily the agent who did the most work. It is the agent the buyer chooses to acknowledge at the closing table.

Commission disputes are fact-specific — who introduced whom, what was signed, what was paid. In the absence of a signed, timestamped document fixing the introducing agent's identity, the buyer gets to write that history unilaterally.

## The Three Moves Buyers Use Most Often

Understanding what buyers actually do — without casting any buyer as a villain — is essential for protecting yourself. Most buyers who play this game are not running a calculated scam. They are managing their own costs, and agents who have failed to document anything have left the door wide open. Here are the patterns that come up again and again.

### The Silent Switch

The buyer makes initial contact through Agent A — phone, WhatsApp, or a portal form. Agent A shows the property, answers questions, and reports to his broker that things look promising. The buyer then finds the same listing on a different portal through Agency B, reaches out, and has a second showing. When it comes time to make an offer, the buyer proceeds through whichever agent has accepted a lower commission or was simply easier to deal with. Agent A has a trail of messages. Agent A has no signed Form B. Agent A has nothing enforceable.

### The Direct Approach

Two co-broke agents are working a listing together. The buyer attends showings, goes quiet, then contacts the seller directly — sometimes through the building's own community Facebook group, sometimes through the developer's re-sale department, sometimes just through LinkedIn. The buyer makes a lower offer "to save on commission." The seller, who sees a faster, cheaper deal, agrees. The commission pot disappears entirely.

### The Split Squeeze

This one happens inside a co-broke deal that is actually progressing. Both agents know the buyer. Both agencies are involved. But there is no Form I — no signed agent-to-agent agreement — between them. At the point of signing Form F, the buyer's agent tells the listing agent that the buyer is uncomfortable paying more than 1% commission and threatens to walk. The listing agent, who cannot afford to let the deal die, either absorbs the shortfall internally or pressures the co-broke agent to accept less. The agent who did the viewings gets squeezed because nothing was locked in before the client had leverage.

## What the Forms Were Built to Prevent (and Why They Often Don't)

Dubai has a solid regulatory skeleton. RERA requires written agreements, including Form A and Form B. Form A, Form B, and Form F work together as a single contractual framework: Form A records the relationship between the seller and the broker, defining the listing terms and the broker's commission; Form B defines the engagement between the buyer and the broker, typically covering search, viewing, and offer submission.

The Dubai Land Department Form F will cover property and financial details and the commission to be paid to the seller's and buyer's agents. Agent commission — typically 2% of the sale price — becomes legally due upon Form F signing.

So the framework is there. The problem is not the law; it is timing and discipline. Agents often skip Form B because it can feel awkward with a new buyer. Form I — the agent-to-agent agreement between co-broking agencies — gets deferred because both agents are focused on the viewing and the offer, not the paperwork. And Form F only captures commission arrangements at the point of the signed MOU. By that time, a buyer who wants to restructure the deal knows they have maximum leverage.

When two brokers collaborate on a deal, the commission structure must be agreed upon in advance. Without a clear agent-to-agent agreement, commonly known as Form I, many agents end up in costly disputes or losing their commission entirely.

The forms are not a bureaucratic inconvenience. They are the documentation trail that a DLD or RERA dispute process will use to determine who gets paid. Commission disputes are fact-specific — who introduced whom, what was signed, what was paid. If the answer to any of those three questions is "we have nothing written," the agent without paper is the agent who loses.

## The Agent-to-Agent Agreement: The Document Most at Risk

Of all the forms in a Dubai co-broke deal, Form I is the one most likely to be skipped, delayed, or treated as an afterthought. In Dubai's cooperative brokerage ecosystem, multiple agencies often work together; Form I confirms which agent introduced the buyer and how commissions will be shared. It also captures the buyer's acknowledgement that both brokers are involved.

When two brokers collaborate — one representing the buyer, one the seller — Form I governs the commission split and professional conduct. Without it, there is no agreed percentage, no recorded introduction, and no mechanism to enforce payment from one agency to another if the deal completes.

In Dubai, there is no official law dictating the exact split for agent-to-agent commissions, but the commonly accepted standard for sale transactions is a 50/50 split of the total commission. That convention is useful, but a convention is not a contract. A buyer who senses that the two agencies have no formal arrangement between them can exploit that gap — either by threatening to walk, by approaching the seller directly, or simply by choosing to proceed through whichever agent is easiest and leaving the other one to fight the aftermath.

The lesson is blunt: Form I is not something you sign after the offer is in. It is something you sign before the second showing.

## Why "We Had an Understanding" Loses Every Time

When agents say "we had an understanding," they mean a WhatsApp exchange, a verbal agreement on a call, or a shared Google Sheet that neither party's management ever reviewed. This is not evidence. It is a starting point for a dispute that will go nowhere.

In a dual-agency dispute, the paper trail determines the outcome. This is equally true in co-broke disputes. The agent who can produce a timestamped, signed Form I, a Form B with the buyer's signature, and a message trail showing they introduced the buyer to the specific property on a specific date is in a fundamentally different position from an agent who can produce nothing but conviction.

The Real Estate Regulatory Agency (RERA) and the Dubai Land Department (DLD) oversee property-related disputes, including disputes with real estate agents. If a matter escalates, RERA's formal complaint process will look at what was agreed and what was documented — not at who deserves it morally. Depending on the severity of the issue, an agent may face warnings, fines, licence suspension, or cancellation. But enforcement against a counterparty only becomes possible when there is a written agreement the counterparty has breached. No agreement, no breach. No breach, no remedy.

The VAT dimension adds another layer. The standard commission is 2% of the purchase price on a property sale and 5% of the annual rent on a residential lease, with 5% VAT added to the commission in both cases. VAT is charged on agency fees. When commission splits are informal, it is almost impossible to issue proper tax invoices to the right entities, which creates accounting problems downstream — especially where the receiving brokerage needs to account correctly to its own agents.

## The Rental Side: Ejari and the Same Problem in a Different Form

The dynamic is not exclusive to sales. In leasing deals, co-broke arrangements — where one agent has the landlord and the other brings the tenant — face the same documentation gaps. The buyer equivalent here is the tenant who calls the landlord's agent directly after a showing organised by a different broker.

In rentals, the introduction problem is if anything sharper, because the transaction moves faster. A tenant can go from first viewing to signed tenancy agreement in 48 hours. Landlords and tenants must register their rental agreement on Ejari; once registered, the lease is recognised by the government. By the time Ejari registration happens, the deal is done. If the commission split between the two agencies was never formalised, the agent who brought the tenant is standing outside a completed transaction with no documented claim.

The practical response is identical to the sales side: the co-broke agreement needs to be signed before the showing, not after the tenant has fallen in love with the apartment. A signed acknowledgement — even a simple WhatsApp confirmation followed by a formal document — that identifies both agencies' roles before the tenancy terms are discussed is the difference between a collectible claim and a complaint to RERA that will drag on for weeks with no guaranteed outcome.

## What Buyers Actually Know (That Many Agents Forget)

Experienced buyers — investors running portfolio acquisitions, relocating executives who have done Dubai deals before, investors who have purchased three or four units in the same tower — know the regulatory framework better than many agents give them credit for. They know that:

- Commission rates are market custom, not fixed by law. The 2% and 5% rates are market custom, not law; RERA recognises these as standard but does not enforce them — parties are free to agree on different rates.
- A buyer who has not signed Form B has no contractual obligation to the showing agent.
- Two agencies without a signed Form I have no enforceable claim against each other.
- The commission declared on Form F is what the parties sign at MOU stage — and if a buyer has not committed to an agency in writing by that point, they can still negotiate that figure.

None of this makes buyers dishonest. It makes them rational. The protection for the agent is documentation, not trust.

## The Fix: Document Early, Split Early, Pay Once

The structural solution is simple in principle, even if discipline in execution is hard to maintain under market pressure.

**Sign Form B before the first serious showing.** Not after. A buyer who has signed Form B has formally engaged the agent. If they then proceed through a different channel, there is a clear paper trail of the original relationship. The discomfort of asking a buyer to sign Form B is minor compared to the discomfort of watching a deal close without you.

**Sign Form I before the second showing, at the latest.** Two agencies working together on the same unit need their co-broke arrangement documented before the buyer is in negotiations. To protect both agents, signing an agent-to-agent agreement before working together is essential; Form I is designed to protect an agent's listings and clients, must be completed when two agents decide to work together, and ensures a professional relationship is established and gives each agent the right to compensation provided they contribute to the sale or rental of the property.

**Capture the split percentage explicitly.** Do not rely on the 50/50 convention. Write the percentage into Form I. If the split is something other than equal — perhaps because one agency is bringing a harder-to-source buyer type, or because one party is taking on more of the administration around the NOC process — agree it, put it in the document, and have both sides' management sign it.

**Tie the commission payment to Form F.** In Dubai's secondary property market, the MOU commonly called Form F confirms the agreed sale price, deposit, agency commission, transfer date, mortgage status, and special conditions. The commission figures that appear on Form F represent what is legally due. Ensuring that both the buyer-side commission and the seller-side commission are correctly recorded on Form F, with split amounts already agreed in Form I, closes the loop between the regulatory document and the actual payment.

**Commission by cheque, to the brokerage.** Commission should always be paid by cheque made out to the brokerage, not to the individual agent personally — this is a RERA requirement and creates a paper trail that protects both parties if a dispute arises later. Once commission hits the brokerage in one transaction cycle, internal splits between agencies happen cleanly and with proper documentation.

## Off-Plan: A Different Setup, Not a Different Problem

Off-plan deals remove one layer of complexity — developers pay the agent commission on off-plan properties, and the commission percentage can vary from developer to developer and from project to project. The developer's own escrow account, mandated under Dubai's off-plan regulations, holds buyer funds separately from the developer's operating account, which gives buyers some structural protection — but this is a legal mechanism governing buyer funds, not agent payments.

In co-broke off-plan deals, the developer typically holds a co-broke agreement with each registered agency. The problem of a buyer playing agents against each other is less acute in off-plan because the developer ultimately controls the registration and the commission release. However, disputes still arise between agencies over who introduced the buyer first — particularly in cases where the buyer toured a developer showroom independently before being registered by an agent. The documentation discipline is the same: registration of the buyer under a specific agency, before any meaningful sales conversation occurs, is the protection.

## What a Dispute at the RERA Level Actually Looks Like

When a commission dispute does reach RERA or the DLD's dispute channels, the process is not emotionally satisfying. It is administrative. Both parties submit their evidence. The evidence that matters is: who introduced whom, what was signed, what was paid. A case built on WhatsApp screenshots of an informal conversation will always be weaker than one anchored to a signed Form B, a signed Form I with timestamped execution, and the relevant Trakheesi permit number showing which agency held the valid listing at the time.

Depending on the severity of the issue, the outcome may include warnings, fines, licence suspension, or cancellation for the non-compliant party. But getting to that outcome — even when justified — takes time and management bandwidth that most agencies cannot absorb comfortably during a busy market. The practical cost of a dispute is not just the lost commission. It is the weeks of back-and-forth, the management hours, and the relationship damage inside an industry where co-broke relationships are ongoing.

Prevention is not just cheaper than cure. In many cases, the cure is genuinely unavailable without a signed piece of paper that should have existed from the beginning.

## The Principle That Resolves Most of This

Every problem described in this article — the silent switch, the direct approach, the split squeeze — has the same root cause. A service was delivered before the terms of payment for that service were agreed and documented. The buyer had the use of the agent's knowledge, time, and access to a property. No written obligation existed at the moment it was created. So the buyer retained all the optionality and the agent carried all the risk.

The reversal of that dynamic is the goal. When both agents have signed Form I, when the buyer has signed Form B, when the co-broke split is written and agreed before the offer lands, and when the commission figures on Form F match what was locked in at the start — the buyer has no gap to exploit. There is no version of the deal in which disappearing to the listing agent directly produces a better outcome for them, because every party's role and every party's payment is already documented in a form that RERA will recognise.

The sequence is: agree, sign, then proceed. Not proceed and hope. Not proceed and assume 50/50. Not proceed on a handshake and formalise it if the deal converts.

The split agreed and signed before the client pays, with every party paid from the same closing table at the same moment, is the outcome that removes the friction. It is not a clever new idea. It is a return to what the RERA forms were designed to enforce — and an acknowledgement that the forms only work when agents treat them as the starting line, not the finish line.