How to Pick the Right Person to Be on Your Side of the Table

How do you know if a buyer’s agent in Portugal is actually on your side? The questions that reveal real alignment — including the one almost no buyer asks.

How to Vet a Buyer’s Agent in Portugal

So the question is not whether someone calls themselves buyer-side. It is how you tell, before you hand them the largest purchase of your life, whether they actually are. That is what this article is for. This article holds nothing back: choosing well is entirely in your interest, and the more sharply you can question an advisor — any advisor at all — the better served you are.

None of the questions below is aggressive. All are fair. And a genuine buyer-side advisor answers each one easily, directly, and unhurried — because there is nothing to hide behind.

1. “Who, concretely, pays you?”

The first question, and the one everything else rests on. Not “do you represent buyers” — everyone says yes. Who pays you.

A genuinely buyer-side advisor is paid by the buyer, and by no one else. The answer to listen for is that simple. What should give pause is anything that routes payment through the other side of the table: “it’s free to you,” “the seller pays my share,” “the commission is split.” A service that is free to the buyer is being paid for by someone whose interests are not the buyer’s — and a service paid for by the other side answers to the other side.

2. “Do you hold any properties of your own?”

Listings, exclusives, developer agreements, a portfolio to place. An advisor with inventory of their own faces a quiet pull the buyer never sees: the property that suits the buyer may not be the one that suits the advisor to move. An advisor with nothing of their own to sell has nothing to steer a buyer toward. Ask directly, and notice whether the answer is a clean “no” or a qualified one.

3. “How are you paid for anything you refer me to?”

Mortgage brokers, lawyers, insurers, currency services, renovation firms. Referral commissions are a second, hidden alignment — with the partners who pay them, not with the buyer. The answer that protects the buyer is either “I take nothing” or “any referral fee is disclosed and credited back to you.” Anything vaguer is worth following up.

4. “What, exactly, is in the contract?”

An alignment that is not written down is not an alignment; it is a mood — and moods change without notice. Ask what the mandate commits them to. Is it exclusive to the buyer? Does it prohibit them, in writing, from taking any payment from the seller’s side? Portuguese law already forbids a mediator from being paid by both sides of the same deal — but a serious advisor puts that position in the contract rather than asking the buyer to trust it.

5. “Would you ever tell me not to buy?”

Then watch whether they can give a real example. An advisor willing to kill a deal — to say “not this one,” or “not yet,” or “walk away” — is an advisor whose interest is in the right outcome, not merely an outcome. Anyone who earns only when the buyer buys will find that sentence very hard to say, and harder still to mean.

Few advisors are fully aligned on every line — most are a mix. The point of reading the answers is not to find someone flawless, but to know precisely what is being accepted, and to accept it with your eyes open rather than by default. You may decide an imperfect answer is fine for your situation. That is your call to make — but make it knowing it is a call.

Alignment scorecard

Fill in a line for each answer as it lands.

Alignment Scorecard

1. Who pays you?

AlignedOnly the buyer, by written mandateDependsBuyer pays, but takes referral fees elsewhereFlag“It’s free to you” / seller-side pays

2. Own properties?

AlignedNone — no listings or exclusivesDependsHolds some, but discloses and excludes them from your searchFlagHas inventory, steers you toward it

3. Paid on referrals?

AlignedNothing, or credited to youDependsTakes them, but discloses eachFlagUndisclosed referral commissions

4. In the contract?

AlignedExclusive; seller-pay prohibited in writingDependsWritten mandate, but silent on seller-side payFlagNothing in writing

5. Tell me not to buy?

AlignedYes — with a real exampleDependsSays yes, but no example to handFlagOnly earns if you buy

6. If I don’t buy for six months?

AlignedA structure that can waitDependsSome pressure, but manages it openlyFlagPure close-pressure; income only on completion

Few advisors are fully aligned with your objectives on every answer they give. What matters is that you now know exactly where this one stands — and can decide for yourself.

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For more on applying the scorecard, see the Buyer-Side Agent Independence Test →

Those five will tell you most of what you need to know. But there is a sixth question — one almost no buyer thinks to ask, and the one that goes deeper than all the others.

The question almost no one asks

“If I don’t buy anything for six months — because nothing is right — what happens to you?”

It sounds like small talk. It is the most revealing question you can ask.

Under the standard model, an agent is paid only when a deal closes. The months of work before that — time, travel, analysis — they finance themselves, betting on the sale. So an agent who must self-finance all of his own work upfront, and whose only income is a percentage of the final sale price, cannot afford to be patient — nor to fight for a lower price. Every month without a signature is a loss he carries alone, and that pressure does not stay with him. It reaches the buyer: as urgency, as reluctance to talk anyone out of a merely-adequate home, as an inability to say let’s keep looking.

So listen past the promise of patience to the structure beneath it. Three things let an advisor pursue the right result instead of the fast one.

Reputation is their real asset. For a buyer-side practice, the next client comes from the last one served well — so a rushed sale into the wrong home costs far more than it earns. The long game outweighs the quick commission. An agent living deal to deal has no long game.

Their fee rewards the lower price, not merely the sale. A commission set as a percentage of the price quietly rewards a higher one. A fee tied to the saving rewards the opposite — the lower the final price, the better they do. That single inversion makes patience their interest too.

Any advance is returned if the deal falls through. Where a payment is taken up front, it is an advance against the final fee — refundable if nothing completes. It does not pay them to close. It filters out the merely curious and eases the strain of a long search, nothing more.

None of this is magic, and an honest advisor will say so: no structure fully covers the time, risk and opportunity cost of a search that ends in nothing. Perfect alignment does not exist. What exists is a structure whose incentives point the buyer’s way — set against the one pressure that points away, the need to close. Their answer will tell you which is stronger.

Putting it to use

You now have six questions and a way to read the answers. Use them on anyone you are considering. A genuine buyer-side advisor does not flinch at a single one, because for them the honest answer to each is already the aligned one. The advisors who struggle are precisely the ones the label was designed to obscure.

Whether you need such an advisor at all is a fair question in its own right — not everyone does, and there are cases where the honest answer is no. But if you have read this far with a specific person already in mind, you may find you no longer need to wonder how they would answer. You can simply ask them.

Soverite is a licensed buyer-side property advisory in Portugal (AMI 27281), working exclusively for buyers — never for sellers, never on listings.

Last reviewed: 12 March 2026.

This article is provided for general information and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, financial, or investment advice. Information is accurate to the best of our knowledge as of the last review date shown above and may change without notice. Scenarios described are illustrative archetypes of common market situations and do not depict any specific person, client, transaction, or company. Reading this article does not create a client relationship with Soverite.

This article was produced, structured and reviewed by Soverite’s executive team, working with agentic LLM systems.