Glossary

Designated Agency

Also known as: appointed agency

An arrangement in which a brokerage represents both parties to a transaction but designates two different individual agents within the firm to represent the buyer and seller separately, each owing fiduciary duties only to their assigned client.

Designated agency is the compromise many states and firms use to keep in-house deals from becoming full dual agency: it preserves individual fiduciary advocacy — the buyer's designated agent can still push hard on price and terms against the seller's designated agent — while allowing the brokerage as a whole to collect both sides of the commission. The firm itself typically still owes limited duties of confidentiality across the two agents; information one agent learns from their client generally cannot be shared with the other agent absent consent, which requires internal information barriers similar in spirit to a Chinese wall. Large CRE brokerages with big rosters of agents rely heavily on designated agency to keep both a listing and a buyer-side assignment in-house without triggering full dual-agency disclosure requirements.