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Came here to say this. I'm a small real estate owner (alongside running a tech co). I spent about 90 minutes yesterday reviewing an agency agreement giving a brokerage the exclusive right to market one of my units (commercial) for lease. Even in such a "simple" contract, I demanded many changes. They wanted the exclusive right to represent us in case the building was sold - I took that out. They wanted a flat 5% commission for the length of the lease - I changed that to only the first seven years. They wanted indemnity, and to be reimbursed for expenses, and many other things I just wasn't going to do. It was the same thing with a lease earlier this year. We argued for months over the terms - how much rent, who was responsible for HVAC (me as owner, for replacing one unit, the tenant for ordinary repair and maintenance), late charges, whether or not we were doing ACH (my preference) or paper checks, whether or not a renewal option was included (I took that out), and a bunch of junk their lawyer wanted that I mostly managed to keep out. Now, maybe there are some very basic agreements that can be relatively boilerplate, low-value things, or maybe it's valuable to start from some kind of common standard. But in my experience, the whole concept of this product is flawed. It actually reminds me of something I built 5-6 years ago, a simple chat bot (called Interval) to handle scheduling for low-value items like tennis courts, or conference rooms. My view of scheduling was a practical problem, almost algorithmic, of making it easy to reserve something. What I didn't understand, was the huge amount of social context inherent in scheduling--who's important, who's friends with who, who's doing somebody a favor, who gets special treatment, and why. There's a lot of social context there that means scheduling is going to stay in the human realm, for a LONG time, long, long after 50 more people try replacing it with an LLM. This product feels the same. Every business contract is a complicated dance involving negotiating power, who needs who more, who cares more, what language stays in vs comes out, settling some kind of score (I did this for you last time, you owe me this time), and 100 other things. There might some kind of low-value contracts that aren't customarily negotiated, or maybe real estate is a particularly negotiation-intensive field (very possible), but I have a very, very hard time seeing all of this getting "standardized" in the name of efficiency improvement. It just isn't going to happen. |
On the other hand, I live in Pennsylvania, and I bought my house using the PA Standard Agreement for the Sale of Real Estate. https://www.parealtors.org/standard-forms/ I spoke to a local real estate attorney who told me that there's no point in trying to negotiate the boilerplate in the doc, and I should only focus on a handful of variables like price, escrow, closing period, etc. He said that virtually all of the houses in our area are sold on the standard contract.
So my hope is that we can make tech commercial transactions more like my experience buying a house and less like my experience signing an office lease (or your experience with the agency agreement).