Realtors Consider Role Change : Sales: A growing number of real estate agents are seeking to represent buyers. An association task force will present its report at convention.

A National Assn. of Realtors task force, in a move that would reverse decades of practice, has suggested that the giant organization modify its policies so that its members are not automatically obligated to represent sellers in real estate transactions.

Forty-four states, including California, have laws requiring that real estate agents disclose in writing whom they are representing. However, in California and most other states, most agents have continued the longstanding tradition of representing sellers, said a spokeswoman for the California Assn. of Realtors.

The recommendation is seen as a significant concession to the burgeoning “buyer brokerage” movement, where a growing number of real estate agents are seeking to represent buyers in sales transactions, and to criticism that the home buying and selling process in the United States is biased toward sellers.

“You have a whole new evolution of practice in the marketplace,” said Sharon Millett, a Maine real estate broker who headed the 22-member NAR task force that issued the report. Millett said that report’s recommendations are designed to give home buyers and sellers easier access to the “kind of representation” they want.

“Unbelievable,” said Barry Miller, president of Buyer’s Resource, a growing buyer brokerage franchise company with 22 offices in 10 states, who called the recommendations “politically bold and long overdue.”

The NAR task force report, to be presented to the association’s leadership at its midterm convention in Washington this weekend, seeks to relax restrictions on whom real estate agents can represent and also to open up the NAR to more frank disclosure of who is representing whom in transactions.

In doing so, it strikes at the heart of the debate raging within the real estate community over what is called the “agency relationship”--that is, just whom real estate agents do, or should, represent in a transaction.

For the last decade, rules governing multiple listings have stated that when a property is listed with a local multiple listing service, all real estate agents on that MLS system automatically work for the agent who listed the property. That means that the agents are legally expected to represent the seller’s best interest, unless they specifically disavow that responsibility.

The practice has long been criticized because surveys have shown that most home buyers are not aware that the agents who drive them around and show them houses legally represent sellers and should pass on to sellers information they learn that might prove pertinent to a sale, such as how much a buyer is actually willing to pay. Buyer brokers have complained that the NAR’s rules have made it easy for more traditional agents to freeze them out of sales transactions.

Conceding that “consumers lack knowledge regarding the structure of the real estate industry,” the report urges NAR to make optional the practice of obligating agents to represent sellers. That way, agents can have the option of either representing the buyer or of simultaneously representing the buyer and the seller, as long as both parties consent to the arrangement.

“Consumers deserve a choice and brokers deserve a choice and we just need to have the policies and procedures” from the NAR to reflect those choices, Millett said.

The report also urges the NAR to push for stronger laws so that home buyers and sellers can better understand who represents them.

As a model, Millett pointed to a New York law, enacted last year, that has won praise from consumer advocates because of its clear language and its requirement that agents present the form to consumers early in the selling and buying process. That law faced opposition from the NAR while it was wending its way through the approval process in Albany.

Despite its potentially controversial recommendations, the NAR task force report is expected to get a fairly warm reception among the leadership.

The NAR and its various policy committees must approve the recommendation, a process that is expected to take at least several months.