“Who’s Representing You?” by Maximiliano Pablo Götz | CUCICBA • CMCPSI • REALTOR®
Chapter I - An Introduction & Brief History of the Broker in Argentina
This is a natural and powerful follow-up to ‘The Real Deal’ - where the first book was about the market and the process, this one goes deeper into the most important relationship in the transaction: the broker. Let me tell you what this profession used to be and what it is now - because the distance between those two things is, in many ways, the argument for this entire book. There was a period in Argentine real estate - living memory, not ancient history - when a law degree was considered the primary credential for brokering property. Not a specialized degree. Not an examination specific to the practice of real estate. A law degree. General. Broad. Oriented toward contracts and litigation and the architecture of the legal system, which is useful, genuinely useful, but which is not the same thing as knowing how to advise a client through a transaction in a market that operates on relationships, nuance, timing, and a currency situation that would give any reasonable economist a headache. The law teaches you what the contract says. Thirty years in this business teaches you what it means. Those are not the same education. Argentina, to its credit, changed the model. The corredor público inmobiliario is today a regulated professional - university degree in the discipline, national examination, registration with the colegio (association), a code of ethics, a disciplinary framework. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
The martillero - the auctioneer, older and in some ways more colorful, the figure who once set prices at the bang of a gavel in a room full of buyers competing out loud - still exists in the framework and still performs functions that overlap with brokerage. But the corredor is a different figure. The corredor is, or should be, an advisor. Someone who finds the property - not just the ones on Zonaprop (one of many MLS tools), but the ones that never reach the portal because the network got there first. Someone who negotiates - not as a formality, not as theater, but as a professional skill that can move a number by ten or fifteen percent in the right direction if applied correctly and at the right moment. Someone who coordinates the title search and the escribano and the bank and the documentation and the timeline and the thirty things that need to happen in a specific sequence, in two languages, on behalf of a client who is trusting them with the largest financial decision of their life. And someone who, when the keys are handed over and the deal is done, is still there. Still answering. Still the person you call when the next question arrives - because it always does. That is what the profession is supposed to be. Whether the broker across the table from you actually is that person is, as I said at the beginning of this book and as I will say again here at the end, the only question that matters. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter II: Becoming a Broker - Not so much an Hourly Course
People sometimes ask me how one becomes a real estate broker in Argentina - and I suspect what they're really asking is whether it's as easy as it looks. The answer, in the cases where it looks easy, is that it isn't. And in the cases where it looks hard, it's because someone did it correctly. The formal path is a university degree: the Martillero y Corredor Público, offered at institutions across the country, running three to four years depending on the program and the student's pace. It is a serious curriculum - more serious than the profession's public image sometimes suggests - built around a core that reflects what the people who designed it already knew: that real estate, at its foundation, is a legal discipline. Not an aesthetic one. Not a social one. Not a matter of personality and persistence and the ability to keep a client engaged through three apartment visits and a complicated Saturday. All of those things matter, to be sure. But they rest on a legal foundation, and if the foundation isn't there - if the broker in front of you has never genuinely grappled with the Civil and Commercial Code, never sat with the law of property and contracts and obligations long enough to understand not just what it says but why it says it - then everything built on top of that foundation is, at some level, improvised. Which is fine for jazz. Less fine for the largest financial transaction of your life. (To be clear: brokers aren’t lawyers, so we depend on the greater and wider knowledge of lawyers). Four years of law - or its distributed equivalent across the program's curriculum - is not negotiable and is not, in the hands of a serious student, excessive. Contract law, because everything in this profession is a contract. Property law, urban and rural, because the corredor who can only appraise a Palermo apartment is a specialist where generalism is required. Real estate economics and valuation, because the number on the listing sheet is an opinion and the broker's job is to know whether it's a good one. Auction procedure, because the martillero credential carries legal weight that the market still exercises. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
And ethics - taught formally, examined formally, and ideally absorbed as something more than a subject to pass before graduation. The universities that offer this formation in Buenos Aires include UBA through its law school - which should surprise no one, given where the profession's intellectual roots have always been - as well as UADE, the Universidad del Salvador, and the Universidad de Belgrano, among others. Each produces graduates of varying quality, as universities everywhere do. What the good ones produce - what the serious student who took the coursework seriously and passed the licensing examination with something to show for it produces - is a professional who knows what they're doing. Who knows what the contract means. Who knows whose side they are on and why that matters. Who, when something goes wrong at the closing table, doesn't need to call a lawyer - because they already know what the lawyer is going to say. That is the corredor this profession was designed to produce. Whether the market delivers one to your doorstep is a separate question - and the reason this book exists. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter III: Federal, local, and association-based laws
Let’s talk very briefly about which laws govern the practice of real estate - professionally - by brokers. 1.) Civil and Commercial Code (Código Civil y Commercial de la Nación) in articles 1345 to 1350, defines the brokerage contract, establishing that the broker has the right to receive compensation and reimbursement for expenses if the transaction is completed, while mediating the negotiations between the parties. 2.) Law 25.028. This is the legal framework law for auctioneers and public brokers. It determines the mandatory requirements to practice, such as holding a university degree and being registered / licensed. 3.) The conduct of brokers registered with CUCICBA (Realtors’ Association of the City of Buenos Aires) is governed by Law No. 2340 and its respective Code of Professional Ethics. These documents establish mandatory rules on transparency, commercial loyalty, and the correct practice of real estate activity in the City of Buenos Aires. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter IV - Licensing, Registration & Accountability
Three acronyms. They matter, so let's go through them quickly and without ceremony. CUCICBA - Colegio Único de Corredores Inmobiliarios de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires - is the body that licenses real estate brokers in the City of Buenos Aires. It examines them, registers them, assigns them a matricula number, and maintains the authority to suspend or revoke that number when the holder does something the profession cannot tolerate. CMCPSI - Colegio de Martilleros y Corredores Públicos de San Isidro (which is one of several districts in Province of Buenos Aires) - does the same thing for the Province. Together they are the institutional architecture of legitimate real estate practice in the greater Buenos Aires market. NAR - the National Association of Realtors - is the American professional body whose REALTOR® designation represents a voluntary commitment to a code of ethics, continuing education, and accountability to a standard that approximately 1.5 million members have agreed to uphold. In the Argentine context, the broker who carries all three of these designations has chosen, repeatedly and at some effort, to be held accountable - by the Argentine regulatory system, by an international professional standard, and by the specific, enforceable obligations that come with each. That is a choice. Not every broker in this market makes it. Which brings us to the part of this chapter that nobody puts in the brochure. Unlicensed brokers exist in Buenos Aires. They are not rare. They are not operating in the shadows. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
They are showing apartments, writing offers, collecting deposits, and facilitating real estate transactions in this city right now, today, without a matricula, without registration with any colegio, and without any formal accountability to anyone for anything that happens as a result of their involvement. The Buenos Aires real estate market - large, cash-based, relationship-driven, and structured in a way that does not require a license to list a property on a portal or answer a phone call or arrange a showing - is precisely the kind of environment in which operating without credentials is not only possible but, in certain quarters, entirely unremarkable. The unlicensed broker is not always more dishonest than the licensed one. The difference is not necessarily character. The difference is consequence. When a licensed broker fails you - genuinely, materially, in ways that caused you harm - there is a mechanism. A formal complaint to the colegio. A disciplinary process. A record. A license that can be suspended or revoked and that the broker therefore has some interest in protecting. When an unlicensed broker fails you, there is a person who is no longer returning your calls. Nothing else. No mechanism. No record. No lever. Verification takes five minutes and costs nothing. Ask for the matricula number. Check it on the CUCICBA website, which is public, which is free, and which will tell you in the time it takes to read this sentence whether the person across from you is who they claim to be. The right broker gives you the number before you ask. I know this because I am one of them. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter V - The Code of Professional Ethics
"He thinks that morals are paintings on walls and scruples are money in Russia." - Sabrina, 1954. Written by Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor, and Ernest Lehman. I want to introduce you to someone. You may have met him already - at an open house, at a first meeting, across a table where he slid a contract toward you and told you it was standard. He's charming. He's well-dressed. He speaks enough English to make you feel comfortable and not quite enough to make you feel safe. And somewhere behind the smile is a man who genuinely believes - not cynically, not guiltily, but with the peaceful conviction of a person who has never been told otherwise - that ethics are décor and integrity is a foreign market. He is not the exception in Argentine real estate. He is not the rule, either. But he is out there. The professional ethics framework governing Argentine real estate brokers is built around four primary obligations. Not suggestions. Obligations - named, codified, and backed by a disciplinary process that, at its most serious, ends a career. The first is professional duty. The corredor must act with truthfulness, transparency, loyalty, and good faith - toward both parties in the transaction, advising responsibly and protecting each side against fraud. This is not passive. The broker who sits quietly while something goes wrong in front of them has not met this obligation. The broker who knew something and didn't say it has not met this obligation. The broker who was more interested in closing than in advising has not met this obligation. The second is professional secrecy. What the client shares in confidence stays in confidence. The negotiations are not public property. The client's financial position, their timeline, their motivations - these are protected. A broker who shares them, with anyone, for any reason that serves the deal rather than the client, has violated this obligation. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
The third is transparency in operations. The broker verifies ownership. They pull the title and lien reports from the official registry. They disclose their commission - in full, in advance, before the first document is signed and before the first peso moves - because a client who finds out what they were charged after the fact is a client who was not given the information when they needed it. And the fourth is sanctions. Non-compliance with the professional ethics framework carries disciplinary consequences: a formal reprimand, financial penalties, temporary suspension of the license, or permanent cancellation of the matricula - which is, for a licensed corredor, the professional equivalent of ceasing to exist. The framework is serious. The obligations are real. The consequences for ignoring them are defined and enforceable. What they are not is automatic. Which is why, in the end, the most important thing you can do in this market is know the framework well enough to recognize when the person across from you is honoring it - and when they are not. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter VI - The Three-Part Framework
Any about out there about Argentine real estate will cover the legal. Not because the authors are lazy or because the ethical and cultural dimensions don't exist, but because the legal is the part that can be enumerated. The CUIT. The escritura. The informes de dominio. The commission structure. The stamp tax. The sequence of steps between the first offer and the final deed. These things can be listed, explained, and committed to the page with the confidence of someone who knows that the facts are stable and the reader will find them useful. The legal framework is the skeleton of the transaction. Without it, nothing holds. Every serious resource on Argentine real estate covers it, including this one, because a buyer who doesn't understand the legal framework of the market they are entering is a buyer who will be surprised at the closing table - and the closing table is not a place that rewards surprise. To the best of my knowledge, no books on Argentine real estate cover the ethical (save the code of ethics). Not because the ethical framework doesn't exist - it does, in the Civil and Commercial Code, in the CUCICBA ethics code, in the four duties that every licensed corredor is legally bound to uphold - but because the ethical framework is harder to enumerate than the legal one. It lives not in the text of the law but in the space between what the law requires and what the broker chooses to do when the requirement is inconvenient. The duty of disclosure is in the code. What happens when disclosure is inconvenient for the commission is not in the code. The duty of loyalty is in the code. What happens to loyalty when the broker represents both parties and one of them is willing to pay more is not in the code. The ethical framework is where the legal framework ends and the character of the individual broker begins. It is, for that reason, the framework that matters most and the one that receives the least attention. Until now. And no book in English has covered the cultural gap. Not this one's predecessor, not the resources that exist online, not the guides that the various agencies publish for foreign buyers - because the cultural gap is the hardest of the three to write about, and the most important. It is not (just) about language. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter VII - The Language Problem
What happens when a broker's English is good enough to close a deal but not good enough to explain a contract? Or what the next steps are to encompass? The specific vocabulary of Argentine real estate law has, in fact, no clean English translation. Nor does nuance or colloquialism or idiom. Fully bilingual isn't just a feature - it's a safeguard. A broker who speaks fluent English can still operate within a professional culture that produces outcomes the foreign buyer was not expecting and would not have agreed to had anyone explained them in advance. The cultural gap is the distance between what a buyer from the United States, or Germany, or Australia, or Canada has been trained by their own market to expect - the disclosure standards, the fiduciary obligations, the responsiveness, the transparency, the specific and tacit understanding of what it means for a broker to be on your side - and what Argentine practice, shaped by its own history and its own relationship between broker and client and transaction and commission, actually delivers. It is the gap that produces the most frustration. The most avoidable mistakes. The most expensive surprises. And it is, until this sentence, the gap that nobody writing in English has bothered to name. Legal. Ethical. Cultural. Three frameworks. One transaction. And the foreign buyer who understands all three before they sign anything is the buyer who never has to explain, after the fact, what they wish someone had told them. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter VIII: The Start and End of the Broker’s Mandate
A professor of law and ethics told me something once - I was young enough that I wrote it down, and have since had enough years in this business to understand why. The job of the broker, he said, is to make the road easier. That's it. That's the whole thing. Everything else - the legal framework, the market knowledge, the negotiating skill, the bilingual fluency, the relationships with the right escribano and the right bank and the right people in the right offices - is infrastructure. It is the equipment you carry so that when the client arrives at the road, it is smoother than it was before you got there. The client's life should be easier because you are in it. The transaction should be less frightening because you have seen it before. The contract should be less opaque because you have read a thousand of them and can translate not just the Spanish but the meaning underneath the Spanish - the intention, the obligation, the consequence, the thing the other party is actually committing to. That is the measure of a broker worth hiring. Not how much they know. How much lighter they make the load. The broker has the legal task referred to as corretaje. The legal concept of corretaje is, at its core, beautifully simple - and like most beautiful things, considerably more complicated in practice than it appears on paper. Corretaje is the joining of parties. The broker - the corredor - is the professional whose defined function under Argentine law is to bring together two people who have not yet completed a transaction, and to create the conditions under which they can. Not to represent one. Not to favor one. Not to close the deal at any cost to either. To mediate. To stand in the space between a seller who has a property and a buyer who has a need, and to find - through knowledge and skill and the particular human talent for understanding what people actually want as opposed to what they say they want - the point at which those two things become one transaction. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
The Civil and Commercial Code uses the word intermediación - intermediation, the act of being between. And that is precisely what corretaje is: a professional discipline built around the premise that the space between two parties is not empty. It is where the deal lives. And the broker's job - the whole job, the one that everything else is in service of - is to know how to work that space. But wait, there’s more! The transaction that goes exactly as planned is the easy one. There is no particular skill involved in showing up to a closing where the title is clean, the seller is cooperative, the documentation is in order, and the funds have arrived where they were supposed to arrive at the time they were supposed to arrive. Any broker can close that deal. The broker in front of you has presumably closed many of them. The question - the real question, the one that separates the professional from the technically-licensed - is what they do when that is not the transaction in front of them. Thirty years in this market has made me, among other things, a connoisseur of the unexpected. The title search that returns with a name that doesn't quite match. The seller who decides, at a moment that is specifically inconvenient for everyone, that one of the terms they agreed to three weeks ago now strikes them differently. The regulatory change that went into effect on a Tuesday and that has introduced a complication nobody in the relevant office can explain with any consistency. The deadline that cannot move and the document that has not arrived and the escribano who is in another closing until four. These are not exceptional circumstances. They are the texture of Argentine real estate on a normal day - and the broker who has trained themselves to respond to them only with the tools that work when everything goes according to plan is, by definition, a broker who will eventually run out of tools. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
The outside-the-box thinker is not someone who ignores the framework. The framework is the framework and it applies whether you are creative or not. The outside-the-box thinker is someone who knows the framework well enough to see where it has room in it. The river has bends. Some of them are sharp. The broker worth having is the one who has been around enough bends to know that the destination is still there - it just requires a different angle of approach than the one you started with. I want to tell you about the time Mercury nearly killed a deal. The client was from China. Serious, prepared, financially ready, entirely committed to the purchase - the kind of buyer every broker wants and most don't deserve. The documentation was clean. The price was agreed. The escribano was booked. And then, somewhere in the approach to late November, the scheduling conversation produced a response I had not previously encountered in thirty years of Argentine real estate: he could not sign between late November and early December. Reason: Family trip, or perhaps business? Programmed surgery? Nope: Mercury was ascending. I absorbed this information with what I hope was professional composure and immediately did two things. The first was to tell the listing agent that we were working through a scheduling matter - because "Mercury is ascending" is a sentence that, in my experience, tends to generate more questions than it answers, and the last thing I needed at that moment was more questions. The second was to go back to my client and think very carefully about what I actually knew about Mercury, which admittedly, was not enough, and what I needed to know, which turned out to be one specific thing. I asked him: ascending where? What time zone? Because Mercury, I reasoned - and I want to be clear that I was reasoning in real time, without preparation, in a situation that my thirty years in this business had not prepared me for - does not ascend everywhere simultaneously. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
There are meridians involved. There are time zones. There is, potentially, a gap. He paused. He consulted, well, whatever one consults in these circumstances. And it turned out that the ascension of Mercury, when mapped against the time zone of Buenos Aires on the specific day in question, left us a window. Small. Tight. But real. We moved. We signed. The deal closed. I have been asked since whether I felt that the universe was testing me. I think the universe was testing my client. I was just the broker who thought to ask about the time zones. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter IX: Potential Conflicts of Interest
Dual agency - the corredor who represents both buyer and seller in the same transaction - is the scenario most frequently cited when people in this industry talk about conflicts of interest. The concern is intuitive: how does one person serve two parties whose interests, at least in theory, point in opposite directions? The buyer wants to pay less. The seller wants to receive more. If the broker knows both numbers, doesn't that create an obvious problem? It would - if the broker's job were to maximize the outcome for one party at the cost of the other. But that is not what corretaje is. Corretaje is mediation. The broker's defined function is to bring parties together, to find the transaction that works, to operate in the space between two sets of needs and locate the point at which they can both be satisfied. A broker of genuine integrity who represents both buyer and seller is not conflicted by that arrangement. They are, in many cases, better positioned to find the right outcome than two brokers working against each other on competing commissions. They know what both parties actually need - not just what they're asking for - and that knowledge, in honest hands, accelerates agreement rather than distorting it. The caveat - and honesty demands one - is that the quality of dual agency is entirely a function of the quality of the broker practicing it. The framework contains no inherent conflict. The human being inside the framework might. A corredor who has privately decided that the seller's satisfaction matters more, or who needs the deal to close at a specific number for reasons that have nothing to do with either client, is not practicing dual agency. They are practicing something else and calling it by a neutral name. The distinction between those two things is not visible in the contract. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
It is visible in the broker - in how they conduct themselves, what they disclose, whose calls they return first, and whether, at the end of the transaction, both parties feel they were treated fairly. That is the test. Not the structure. The person. I always thought: a good deal is one in which both parties leave the table a little unfulfilled. Why? Because necessarily they have to give a little, and renounce a little. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter X - The Types of Broker You'll Encounter
The honest one who knows what they're doing. The honest one who doesn't. The dishonest one who does. And the one who is both dishonest and incompetent - which, as the first book puts it, makes them a monkey with a knife. Now, how to tell them apart before you sign anything? Let's name them clearly, because they deserve to be named. The first is the broker you want - honest, experienced, genuinely in your corner, the kind of professional who has been doing this long enough to have made every mistake once and learned from all of them. They exist. This book is not a brief against the profession; it is a brief for the standard the profession is capable of meeting. The second is the well-meaning one who doesn't know what they're doing - earnest, responsive, prompt to return your calls, and utterly unaware that the title search they just described to you with such confidence contains a category of lien they have never actually encountered before. Intentions: excellent. Outcome: unclear. The third knows exactly what they're doing - which is, from your perspective, the most dangerous combination available, because competence in the wrong direction travels faster than incompetence in the right one. They will close the deal. They will be charming throughout. You will thank them. And somewhere between the oferta and the escritura, in a detail you didn't catch because nobody flagged it, the deal they closed will turn out to have been theirs. And then there is the fourth - the one for whom dishonesty and incompetence have formed a partnership of such spectacular uselessness that the result is not a strategy but a weather event. The monkey with a knife, as I’ve taken to calling him. The one who will cause damage without design, harm without intention, and cost without consequence - at least not to them. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Now. Before you have signed anything. Before the earnest money has left your account and the offer is on the table and the relationship is established and the momentum of the transaction has made walking away feel more complicated than it should be - how do you tell them apart? You ask questions they weren't expecting and you watch what happens. The first type answers them. The second type tries to, gets it slightly wrong, and doesn't know they got it slightly wrong. The third type gives you the answer most likely to keep the deal moving, which is not always the answer to the question you asked. And the fourth gives you something that sounds like an answer in the same way that a weather forecast sounds like a promise. You ask them to show you their license - their CUCICBA registration, their colegio number, the piece of paper that says the state has examined them and found them qualified. The first type produces it without hesitation. The other three, in varying ways and for varying reasons, find the request surprising. That reaction alone is information. In this profession, in this city, in this market - information is everything. And the broker who gives it to you freely, accurately, and at some cost to themselves, is the one who has already told you everything you need to know about whose side they're on. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter XI - The Broker's Legal Obligations to the Client
The Argentine legal framework assigns the corredor four duties. They are worth naming plainly before we examine them, because they sound, when named plainly, like the minimum a professional should be expected to provide - and yet, as this book has established at some length, the minimum is not always what gets delivered. The duty of disclosure: you are obligated to tell your client what you know. Not some of it. Not the parts that don't complicate the deal. What you know. The lien on the title. The neighbor who has filed a complaint. The building that's going up next door. The seller's urgency, if you're aware of it, because a seller who needs to close quickly is a seller who might accept less - and your client deserves to know that before they make their offer rather than after. The duty of confidentiality: what your client tells you stays with your client. Their budget ceiling. Their timeline. The fact that they've already fallen in love with the apartment and will probably pay asking if pushed. That information belongs to them, not to the negotiation. The duty of loyalty: when your interest and your client's interest diverge - and they will, at some point, because your commission is a percentage of the price and your client's goal is to pay less - you act in their interest. Not because it's easy. Because the law says so and because, if you are the right kind of professional, you don't need the law to tell you. To quote another movie, “Every being in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong.” And the duty of competence: you know what you are doing. Not approximately. Not well enough to seem credible in a first meeting. Actually. The initial batch of due diligence you are reading, you understand it. The contract clause you are explaining, you have seen it create a problem before. The negotiation you are conducting, you know where it is going and why. These four duties are not aspirational. They are legal obligations - rooted in the Civil and Commercial Code, reinforced by the CUCICBA framework, binding on every licensed corredor in the City of Buenos Aires. The law is admirably clear on all of them. What the law cannot do is sit in the room with you. That is what choosing the right broker is for. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
To wrap up, let me say something that belongs in this chapter even though it isn't strictly legal in nature. I practice all four of these duties - disclosure, confidentiality, loyalty, competence - on every file, for every client, at every price point, in every transaction whether straightforward or complicated. And the reason, if I am being fully honest, is not purely noble. It is not because I have memorized the Civil and Commercial Code and feel a daily obligation to honor it, though I have and I do. It is not because the CUCICBA ethics framework hangs somewhere in my consciousness like a guiding star, though it informs everything I do. The reason - the real one, the one that operates at the level of genuine self-interest - is that I do not want the call. I do not want the email. I do not want to hear, six months or six years after a transaction has closed, from a client who has since discovered that a better price was available, or that the information I had and withheld would have changed their decision, or that the person they trusted to be in their corner was, at some specific and consequential moment, looking in a different direction. In fact I want just the opposite: I want for the client to send me a Christmas card come the end of year, or ‘hope you’re doing great!’ email out of the blue, or to recommend me to his many millionaire friends. I have no interest in the former. I have never had it. And the way to never have it is not to rely on the client not finding out - because they always find out - but to make it structurally impossible for them to have a legitimate complaint. That is the standard. It happens to align, perfectly and without tension, with what the law requires. Which may be the best argument for practicing it that I have ever encountered: that in this profession, selfishness and ethics are not in conflict. They are, if you do the job correctly, the same thing. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
My childhood friend - and in-house counsel - Alex, often reminds me of a client who purchased a plot of land through our firm… an incredibly complex and multi-layered deal which required more due diligence than strength and stamina would allow; more phone calls and emails and instant messages than there was time in any given week; and risks which we often wondered if they outweighed the reward. At every step of the process, in every meeting, during most phone calls; the clients kept repeating: ‘We… trust Max’, almost in a Shatner-esque cadence. • Seller is re-thinking the deal? ‘We… trust Max.’ • Liens and embargoes rear their ugly heads and threaten closing? ‘We… trust Max.’ • An asteroid is careening across the cosmos, falls out of the sky, and in what can only be described as the worst luck a person can possibly have in the history of statistics and persons, finds itself crashing squarely atop the plot of land? ‘We… trust Max.’ Lots of pressure, to be sure. But… I have come to recognize this - over thirty years - as the highest compliment this profession offers: not enthusiasm, not excitement, but the specific, quiet, considered weight of people who have handed someone the keys to the most important financial decision of their lives and decided, somewhere along the way, that they made the right call. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter XII - Commission: Who Pays, How Much, and When
Let's talk about money. Specifically, who pays what and why - because in Argentine real estate, the answer is different from what most international buyers expect, and different, as it happens, from the model that much of the world has drifted toward in recent years. Both parties pay commission. The buyer pays 4% of the transaction value, plus VAT. The seller pays between 2% and 3%, also plus VAT. These figures are standard, they are disclosed, and they reflect something this market has understood since long before it became a subject of debate in other corners of the world: that the broker is providing a professional service to both the person who is selling and the person who is buying, and that professional services have a cost on both sides of the transaction. It is, once stated plainly, a model of considerable clarity - and one that most foreign buyers, once they understand it, find entirely fair. The commission is the same whether the buyer is from Buenos Aires or Boston. The service is the same. The cost is the same. There are no surprises embedded in the structure, provided someone takes the time to explain it - which is itself, quietly, a test of the broker you have chosen. Where the structure introduces a small degree of complexity is in the scenario where a buyer's broker is working with a listing held by a third-party agency. In that case - and it is a common case, because the Buenos Aires market is not an MLS and listings do not automatically flow between firms - the buyer still pays their 4%. That 4% goes to the listing broker, who then shares some portion of it with the buyer's agent. The split is not standardized. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
It is sometimes 50-50. Sometimes it is less. And sometimes the listing broker, exercising a prerogative that is entirely legal and not always disclosed, shares nothing at all - absorbing the full commission in exchange for allowing the buyer's broker to participate in the transaction as an unpaid guest at someone else's table. The buyer's out-of-pocket cost does not change. But the buyer's broker's motivation changes considerably - and in a profession where motivation and outcome are as closely linked as they are in real estate, the buyer who knows this is the buyer who asks about it before the offer goes in, not after. The buyer who doesn't know it assumes, perhaps reasonably, perhaps not, that everyone in the room is working with equal enthusiasm toward the same result. Sometimes they are. This book exists, in part, for the times they aren’t. Plus, you know what they say about when you assume. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter XIII - Transparency and the Duty to Disclose
The duty of disclosure is simple to state and genuinely difficult to practice - not because the information is hard to gather, but because the information, once gathered, is not always convenient to share. A broker who knows that the building has had recurring water damage in the east-facing units is a broker who also knows that sharing that information might lead the buyer to reconsider, which might lead the deal to fall apart, which might lead the commission to evaporate. The incentive to stay quiet is not theoretical. It is present, in every transaction, in the specific and human form of a number that gets smaller every time a complication is introduced. The duty of disclosure exists precisely because of that incentive - because the legal system recognized, correctly, that the broker cannot be trusted to volunteer inconvenient truths without a formal obligation to do so, and that the buyer cannot be expected to ask about defects they don't know to ask about. The duty of disclosure is the law's answer to the asymmetry of information between a professional who knows the market and a buyer who is encountering it for the first time. It says, in plain terms: tell them what you know. Not what is helpful. Not what is comfortable. What you know. About the property, the seller, the title, the neighborhood, and the transaction - every material fact that a reasonable buyer would want to know before they sign anything. And ideally - this is not a legal requirement, it is a professional standard - the broker should be placing the buyer's interests so completely above their own that the question of what is convenient for the commission never enters the room. Your interests. One hundred percent. That is the standard. It is not always the practice. The doctrine of vicios ocultos - hidden defects, or vicios redhibitorios in the formal language of Argentine civil law - is where the duty of disclosure acquires its most consequential legal expression. A vicio oculto is a defect in the property that existed at the time of purchase, that was not visible or disclosed, that the seller knew about or should have known about, and that would have materially changed the buyer's decision had it been brought to light before the escritura rather than after. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Argentine law holds the seller liable. It also holds the broker liable - specifically, in their professional capacity as the party whose job was to inform the transaction and whose obligation to investigate and disclose did not end at the boundaries of what the seller chose to volunteer. The broker who walked through the apartment and saw the discoloration on the ceiling and said nothing. The broker who was told by the building administrator that the roof had been repaired twice in three years and filed the information away as background. The broker who knew, in the way that experienced brokers always know, that something about this property's history didn't quite add up, and who decided that not knowing officially was better than knowing inconveniently - that broker has not merely failed the ethical standard. They have created legal exposure that survives the closing, survives the handover of keys, and surfaces, with the specific timing that these things always seem to have, at the most expensive possible moment. The vicios ocultos doctrine does not care that the commission has been spent. It cares about what was known, and when, and what was done with it. The broker who tells you everything before you sign - everything, including the things that complicate the deal, including the things the seller would prefer you not know, including the things that might cost the broker a commission they had already started to count - is the broker who never has to worry about that doctrine. And is, not coincidentally, the broker this book has been describing since the first chapter. And let me take it one step further: this broker, the one who has your back, should not have any qualms over telling you ‘hey, don’t purchase this; let’s keep looking.’ Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter XIV - Argentine Real Estate Culture vs. Your Expectations
Let me tell you about a specific kind of foreign buyer. Not a careless one - quite the opposite. This buyer has done their research. They have read articles and watched videos and perhaps even spoken to someone who once spent a weekend in Buenos Aires and came back with opinions. They have bought property before - in their home country, possibly in other countries too - and they have navigated those transactions successfully, which has given them something that is genuinely useful in most contexts and potentially dangerous in this one: confidence. They arrive in Buenos Aires with a list of neighborhoods, a price range, and the name of a real estate firm they recognize. A big one. An international one. One whose sign they have driven past in three different countries. And they walk through the door of that office and they sit down and they feel, in a very human and very understandable way, that they are covered. They are not covered. Not by the logo. Not by the fact that the franchise was founded in the United States, or that the carpeting looks familiar, or that the agent speaks enough English to conduct the meeting without an interpreter. RE/MAX Argentina is not RE/MAX. Century 21 Argentina is not Century 21. Coldwell Banker Argentina is not Coldwell Banker. The brand has been licensed. The training has not been transferred. The legal framework governing Argentine real estate - the Civil and Commercial Code, the CUCICBA requirements, the specific obligations of the corredor público, the transactional sequence from seña to refuerzo to escritura - does not arrive in the shipping container with the logo. What arrives in the shipping container with the logo is the logo. The rest is local. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
And the buyer who confuses the two is making, in the most charitable possible interpretation, the same error as someone who walks into a McDonald's in Buenos Aires expecting the same experience as a McDonald's in Miami - not because they are foolish, but because they have been conditioned by a lifetime of brand consistency to believe that the sign is the product. In real estate, it never is. The product is the person. The training, the knowledge, the ethics, the specific and irreplaceable command of a market that operates on relationships and cash and a legal culture that has no precise equivalent in the buyer's home country - that is what determines whether the transaction goes well or badly. None of it appears on the sign. All of it matters. And the only way to find it - in a franchise office, in an independent firm, in any office on any street in this city - is to ask the right questions of the right person, in the right language, before the money moves. Which is, in the end, what this book has been about from the first page. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Annex to Previous Chapter - Mind the Cultural Gap
The commission guidelines are not a secret. They are published. The ethics code is not ambiguous. It is specific. The colegio did not draft these documents as aspirational literature - they drafted them as professional requirements, binding on every licensed corredor practicing in this city, enforceable by a disciplinary process that can, in sufficiently egregious cases, end a career. And yet there are brokers in this market who charge what they charge and defend it, when challenged, with a response of such practiced brevity that it has become almost elegant in its indifference: don't like it, go elsewhere. Which is, technically, correct. The buyer is free to go elsewhere. What the buyer cannot always do, in that moment - standing in an apartment they have decided they want, in a city they have traveled to specifically, having already invested time and energy and a certain amount of emotional attachment to the outcome - is locate the will to start over. The broker who delivers this response knows that. It is, in some cases, the point. Now add the foreigner. The buyer who has arrived from a country where the exchange rate makes Buenos Aires feel, if not inexpensive, then at least accessible - and who, from a certain angle and through a certain set of assumptions, appears to the broker across the table as someone for whom the standard commission is a floor rather than a figure. The foreigner, in this reading, is loaded. The flight ticket was expensive. The conversion math worked in their favor. They are here because they can afford to be here, which means they can afford to pay a little more, which means the published rate is a starting point and what follows is a negotiation the buyer doesn't know they're in. This assumption is wrong. It is professionally prohibited. It is a violation of the duty of loyalty that this book has covered in some detail and that the ethics code covers in considerably more. It is also, in certain corners of this market, something that happens - not often, not characteristically, not as a reflection of the profession at its best or even its average. But enough that it belongs in print. The buyer who knows what standard looks like is the buyer who pays it. The buyer who doesn't is occasionally the buyer who funds someone else's assumption about what a foreigner can afford. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
The single most effective defense against this is not outrage. It is information. Know the number. Name it early. And if the broker across the table finds that surprising - if knowing the standard commission rate produces a reaction that suggests they were not expecting you to know it - that reaction is, all by itself, the most useful piece of information they have given you. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter XVII - The Cautionary Tales
The names have been changed. Everything else is exactly as it happened. There is a buyer - let's call her Catherine - who flew from Toronto to Buenos Aires, fell in love with an apartment in Recoleta on a Tuesday, and signed something on a Thursday. She didn't read it in full. Her broker told her it was standard. It wasn’t. There is a broker - let's call him what he was, which is absent - who collected his commission at the boleto signing with a handshake and a smile, and whom no one could reach by the time the escritura came around. There is a dual agent who, when asked later whose interests he had represented, said "both parties equally" with the kind of conviction that only comes from someone who has never once examined the statement. And there is a property - a lovely one, actually, on a street with jacaranda trees and good light - that came with a lien attached to it like a barnacle, invisible until it wasn't, expensive until it was resolved, which took fourteen months and a lawyer who charged by the hour. These are the cautionary tales. Not parables. Not hypotheticals. Transactions. Money. Real people, in real situations, making decisions that seemed reasonable at the time - because nobody in the room told them otherwise. That's the thread that connects every story such as this one. Not bad luck. Not the inevitable complexity of a difficult market. A specific, preventable, human failure: the wrong person in the room, or the right person staying quiet when they shouldn't have. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter XVIII - The Escribano (notary public) as a Check on the Broker
The escribano's independent role in the transaction provides a structural safeguard that partially compensates for broker failures. Here is the thing about the Argentine real estate system that nobody puts on the brochure but that every experienced buyer eventually comes to appreciate: it has a failsafe. Not a perfect one. Not one that catches everything, or that arrives early enough to prevent every mistake, or that compensates for a broker who was never on your side to begin with. But a failsafe nonetheless - sitting at the head of the closing table with a law degree, a state appointment, and a professional obligation that is structurally incompatible with looking the other way. That person is the escribano. And while we have already discussed at length what the escribano does - the title search, the lien verification, the aloud reading of every clause before anyone signs anything - what we haven't discussed is what the escribano does specifically in relation to the broker. Which is this: they check. They check independently. Not because the broker asked them to. Not because you asked them to. Because the law requires it, because their license depends on it, and because the Argentine legal system was designed by people who understood - with the particular clarity that comes from watching things go wrong repeatedly - that the parties to a real estate transaction do not always arrive at the closing table with the same information. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
If there is a lien that your broker failed to mention, the escribano will find it. If the seller's name doesn't match the deed, the escribano will catch it. If a number was changed between the offer and the closing - quietly, without announcement, in the way that things sometimes change quietly and without announcement - the escribano will read it aloud, in that room, before you have picked up a pen. This is not a guarantee. It is not a substitute for good representation. It is not the reason to tolerate a broker who is dishonest or incompetent in the twelve weeks before you reach the closing table. But it is the reason that Argentine real estate, for all its complexity and all its room for human failure, has a moment built into it where the truth is legally required to be in the room. Use it. Listen carefully. And if something doesn't sound right - say so before you sign, not after. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
Chapter XIX - My Personal Closing Thoughts
Here is what I want you to leave with. Not the legal framework - though you have it now. Not the commission structure, or the CUCICBA code, or the difference between a corredor público and a martillero, or the seven things the escribano will catch that your broker might have hoped you'd never find out about. Those are tools. They are useful tools. But tools require judgment, and judgment requires something this book can give you but cannot manufacture for you: a standard. A clear, unambiguous picture of what good looks like - so that when you sit across from someone who isn't it, you know. Immediately. Before you've signed anything. Before the money has moved. I have been in this business since 1996. I was nineteen. It was a different century. And in the thirty years since, the single thing I have learned - the one that supersedes everything else, that sits above the market knowledge and the legal framework and the thirty years of navigating one of the world's most complicated and rewarding real estate markets - is this: the broker is the transaction. Not the property. Not the price. Not the neighborhood or the square meters or the view from the fifth floor. The broker. Who they are, what they know, whose side they are actually on, and whether, when it matters, they will tell you the truth even when the truth is inconvenient for them. That is the question this book was built around. That is the question on the cover. And if you close this book having learned nothing else - having skipped every chapter, having read only this page - I hope you leave with at least that: the knowledge that the question exists, that it deserves an answer, and that you are entitled to demand one. Who’s Representing You? Maximiliano Götz
About the Author
An alum of the Lincoln School in suburban Buenos Aires, and with deep North American roots, Max is bicultural by birth and a licensed real estate professional by trade. Having spent the better part of thirty years navigating the tectonic plates of the Argentine property market in fully-bilingual, nothing-lost-in-translation fashion, he studied Law at Universidad del Salvador and Real Estate at Universidad de La Matanza. Through his real estate firm, Max specializes in what he calls "hand- holding” - guiding foreign buyers, from A to Z, through a landscape of cash-heavy closings, astrological variables, multi-cultural nuance. A staunch movie and TV fanatic, Max can quote ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Seinfeld’, chapter and verse. As well, he is a plethora of completely inane information you would never need (who composed the score to 1991’s ill-remembered Gene Hackman vehicle ‘Class Action’?) He can be found in Buenos Aires;, where he manages properties, expectations, and the romantic, often mercurial (but never boring) nature of Argentine day-to-day living.