Everyone else in your transaction — and who picks them

A real estate purchase is not one person’s job. By closing you will have dealt with six or seven people you did not know existed when you started, and nobody hands you the org chart.

Here it is.

Who is actually involved in buying a house?

Six roles, and they arrive in roughly this order.

• The lenderDecides what you can borrow and on what terms. They run your file, order the appraisal, and set the closing date you can actually hit.
• The home inspectorTells you what you are buying. They work for you, not for the seller and not for the lender.
• The appraiserTells the lender what the house is worth. You do not choose the appraiser, and that is deliberate — more on that below.
• The title companySearches the ownership history, issues title insurance, and in most South Dakota transactions runs the closing table itself.
• The insurance agentWrites the homeowner’s policy. Your lender will require it to be in place before closing, which surprises people who leave it to the last week.
• The attorneyAnswers legal questions and drafts or reviews legal documents. Not every purchase needs one. The ones that do, need one early.

Around the edges: a surveyor if the boundary is unclear, specialty inspectors for sewer lines, radon or structure, and the trades who quote whatever the inspection turns up.

Does my agent choose my lender, inspector and title company?

No. You do. What we do is give you a place to start, and then get you in the room.

Where three good options exist, you get three names, not one — with a plain sentence about each and nothing about who we would rather you used. In a market this size three is not always available, and when it is not, you get the two that are, or the one, and we say so rather than padding the list.

Then we arrange the introductions, because a name on a list is not the same as having met someone.

• Lenders — we set up an introductory meeting and we sit in on it. One meeting. Clients tell us it lands better that way than being handed a phone number, and after that the relationship is theirs.
• Title companies — call them or walk in, whichever you prefer. You do not need us in the room for that one.
• Inspectors — usually a phone conversation is enough.

You can stop the process at any point. If you find your own lender, your own inspector, your own title company — through your family, your bank, your neighbor — tell us and we stop looking. That is a finished task, not a rejected recommendation.

One thing we will say plainly: we stop at three. Not because more is hard to produce, but because past three the comparison stops clarifying and starts stalling. More options is not more help.

Why does my agent give me three names instead of just recommending the best one?

Because the best one is the best one for you, and we do not know your file as well as you do.

A lender who is excellent with a straightforward W-2 file can be the wrong lender for self-employment income. An inspector who is thorough and slow is right when you have time and wrong when you have three days. You know which situation you are in.

There is also a plainer reason. A single name is a steer, and a steer is worth something to whoever gets steered to. Three names cost us the ability to sell the recommendation. That is the point.

Can a real estate agent get paid a referral fee for sending me to a lender or a title company?

No — and this is worth understanding, because it is the question underneath every “preferred vendor” list you will ever be shown.

Federal law — the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, Section 8 — prohibits giving or accepting anything of value in exchange for referring settlement-service business on a residential mortgage. That covers lenders, title companies, appraisers and inspections. It is not a disclosure rule. It is a prohibition. “Anything of value” is read broadly: not just money, but gift cards, event tickets, below-cost services, or a steady flow of leads coming back the other way.

So: we are not paid, in any form, by any lender, title company, inspector or appraiser we introduce you to. We cannot be, and we do not.

Why can’t I choose my own appraiser?

Because the appraisal is not for you. It is for your lender.

Your lender orders it, usually through an independent management company, and the separation between the lender’s sales side and the appraiser is required by federal rules written after 2008 — when appraisals were routinely leaned on to make deals close. You are the beneficiary of that annoyance. An appraiser nobody can lean on is an appraiser whose number means something.

So what can you do? Almost nothing — and that is the point.

If the appraisal comes in below the purchase price, there is a proper channel and it runs through your lender, not through the appraiser. A genuine factual error — wrong square footage, a finished basement recorded as unfinished, the wrong number of bedrooms — can be raised that way.

Disagreeing with the value is not a factual error, and the appraiser is free to look again and reach the same number. That is not the system failing. That is the system doing exactly what it was rebuilt to do.

What should I have inspected in the Sioux Falls area specifically?

Beyond the general inspection, ask about radon.

South Dakota has an unusually high rate of elevated radon. The American Lung Association’s figures, reported by South Dakota Searchlight, put the estimated mean level in Minnehaha County at about 6.5 pCi/L, against an EPA action level of 4.0 pCi/L — and about sixty percent of South Dakota homes tested come back elevated, the highest rate in the country. The EPA’s position is that every home should be tested regardless of what the regional map says, because elevated readings turn up in every zone.

It is a test, not a verdict. Mitigation is a known, bounded job, and a seller who has already mitigated has done you a favor. The mistake is not finding radon. The mistake is not looking.

Depending on the house, a sewer scope and a separate structural opinion can be worth more than the general inspection that recommended them.

What if I already have a lender, or an inspector my family has used for years?

Use them.

A professional you already trust beats a name off anyone’s list, including ours. We will work with whoever you bring, and we will tell you honestly if something about the arrangement is going to cost you — a lender who cannot close in the time the contract allows is a real problem, and we will say so. But “they are not on my list” is not a reason, and we will not make it one.

A network is not a reason to hire a buyer’s agent. If it is being sold to you as one, that is worth noticing.

What can a good team not do for you?

Make a bad purchase into a good one.

The best lender in the state cannot make a payment affordable that is not. The most thorough inspector in Sioux Falls cannot un-find a cracked foundation, and would not want to. A coordinated team makes a sound purchase smoother. It does not make an unsound purchase safe.

If an inspection comes back badly enough, we will tell you plainly what we are looking at — including the part that argues against buying it. We will not tell you what to decide. That decision is yours, and it stays yours.

What we will do is make sure you are deciding with everything in front of you, and say the uncomfortable half out loud — even though the uncomfortable half is the one that pays us nothing.

We would rather keep the relationship than get paid to help someone make a bad decision. That is not a slogan; it is the only version of this business that survives twenty years.

Where does REAL Solutions stop?

We are a real estate brokerage, licensed since 2004. We represent buyers.

We do not lend, appraise, inspect, insure, close, practice law, prepare taxes, or repair credit. When your question belongs to one of those professions, the honest answer is an introduction, not an opinion — and you will get the introduction with the reason attached.

Where to go from here

• If credit is the thing standing in the way → Credit and a mortgage
• If you are renting and wondering whether any of this applies yet → Still renting?
• If you want to live in one unit and rent the others → Owner-occupied 2–4 unit

REAL Solutions LLC · Steven J. Buysman, Responsible Broker · Licensed since 2004.
Radon figures as reported by the American Lung Association via South Dakota Searchlight, against the EPA action level. Verified October 2026.