Does Colorado law dictate the ethical standards for the real estate industry?

This code comprehension resource, distributed during the November 2019 REALTORS® Conference & Expo, sets forth two FAQs that clarify the right of cooperating brokers to negotiate commissions with listing brokers. The scenarios covered by the FAQs reference Standards of Practice 3-3 and 16-16.

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Q: There is a home in the MLS that I think my buyer client would love, but the commission being offered by the listing broker is lower than I want to be paid. It’s so low that it won’t cover the time or effort I put in to representing the buyer throughout the transaction. I want to do the right thing. What can I do?

A: Since you believe that your buyer client would love the house, you have an ethical duty to show the listing to your client. But you have a few options to address the fact that the compensation being offered is inadequate. First of all, buyers and sellers can negotiate the commission paid to their brokers and agents at any time. When representing a buyer, you should consider using a buyer agency agreement that sets forth the services you will provide and establishes what compensation your client will be responsible for paying. Often, the buyer agency agreement explains that you will first seek to be compensated in the amount set forth in the listing, but that if that amount is inadequate, you will expect the client to make up the difference between _____ and the compensation provided by the listing broker. It is entirely up to you how you will fill in the blank. The buyer agency agreement is between you and your client, so you and your buyer can negotiate the terms of that agreement at any time.

Additionally, with one exception, you could ask the listing broker to negotiate the offer of commission. The one exception is that you may not submit an offer to purchase that is contingent upon an increase in the commission paid to you by the listing broker. An offer of that nature is thought to be inconsistent with your fiduciary duty to the client. This request can be made at any time during the transaction, even after showing the property or submitting an offer to purchase on behalf of the client.

You could also have a conversation with your buyer client about the commission being too low to cover your time and costs incurred in connection with representing that client. If your client so wishes, he or she could make the decision to condition the offer to purchase the property on an agreement by the seller to pay an additional specified amount. The buyer and the seller are the parties to any contract to purchase the listed property. They can negotiate the terms of that contract as they see fit. Just make sure that your client completely understands the pros and cons of submitting an offer with that type of contingency, and make sure not to pressure your client in any manner that is inconsistent with your fiduciary duty to that client.

Q: Wait, doesn’t Standard of Practice 16-16 prohibit me from negotiating my commission after showing, during the purchase offer phase, or after we have an accepted offer?

A: Absolutely not! Except for the fact that you cannot make an offer to purchase contingent upon an increase in compensation paid to you by the listing broker, you can negotiate your commission with the listing broker at any time during the transaction. Standard of Practice 16-16 is designed to protect sellers and listing brokers from having purchase offers “held hostage” by cooperating brokers demanding a higher commission to be paid by the listing broker. Standard of Practice 16-16 provides as follows:

REALTORS®, acting as subagents or buyer/tenant representatives or brokers, shall not use the terms of an offer to purchase/lease to attempt to modify the listing broker’s offer of compensation to subagents or buyer/tenant representatives or brokers nor make the submission of an executed offer to purchase/lease contingent on the listing broker’s agreement to modify the offer of compensation.

This Standard of Practice never prohibits negotiations between the listing broker and a cooperating broker at any time during the transaction. In fact, Standard of Practice 3-3 expressly authorizes the listing broker and cooperating broker to come to an agreement to change cooperative compensation, and that can happen before a property is shown, after showing, or even after an offer is accepted.

Formally, a string is a finite, ordered sequence of characters such as letters, digits or spaces. The empty string is the special case where the sequence has length zero, so there are no symbols in the string. There is only one empty string, because two strings are only different if they have different lengths or a different sequence of symbols. In formal treatments, the empty string is denoted with ε or sometimes Λ or λ.

The empty string should not be confused with the empty language ∅, which is a formal language (i.e. a set of strings) that contains no strings, not even the empty string.

The empty string has several properties:

In context-free grammars, a production rule that allows a symbol to produce the empty string is known as an ε-production, and the symbol is said to be "nullable".

Use in programming languages[edit]

In most programming languages, strings are a data type. Strings are typically stored at distinct memory addresses (locations). Thus, the same string (for example, the empty string) may be stored in two or more places in memory.

In this way, there could be multiple empty strings in memory, in contrast with the formal theory definition, for which there is only one possible empty string. However, a string comparison function would indicate that all of these empty strings are equal to each other.

Even a string of length zero can require memory to store it, depending on the format being used. In most programming languages, the empty string is distinct from a null reference (or null pointer) because a null reference points to no string at all, not even the empty string. The empty string is a legitimate string, upon which most string operations should work. Some languages treat some or all of the following in similar ways: empty strings, null references, the integer 0, the floating point number 0, the Boolean value false, the ASCII character NUL, or other such values.

The empty string is usually represented similarly to other strings. In implementations with string terminating character (null-terminated strings or plain text lines), the empty string is indicated by the immediate use of this terminating character.

Examples of empty strings[edit]

The empty string is a syntactically valid representation of zero in positional notation (in any base), which does not contain leading zeros. Since the empty string does not have a standard visual representation outside of formal language theory, the number zero is traditionally represented by a single decimal digit 0 instead.

Zero-filled memory area, interpreted as a null-terminated string, is an empty string.

Empty lines of text show the empty string. This can occur from two consecutive EOLs, as often occur in text files, and this is sometimes used in text processing to separate paragraphs, e.g. in MediaWiki.

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