A video crossed my Instagram feed recently — a buyer’s agent telling his audience not to trust an Italian real estate agent. The advice was clean, confident, and aimed at a real fear. It was also, I think, the wrong advice, not because it was dishonest, but because it answered a question nobody should have been asking in the first place.
I do this work too. I am an agente immobiliare, licensed, and I work entirely as an advocate for the buyer — so I have no particular loyalty to defend when I say the premise doesn’t hold up. There are excellent agents in Italy and there are careless ones, in roughly the proportion you’d expect in any licensed profession. I’ve watched a good agent stop a client at the door of a house with a real technical problem and say so plainly. I’ve also watched a bad one stand in the same kind of house, in front of the same kind of problem, and wave it off with “it’s nothing, a few thousand euros and it’s sorted” — knowing perfectly well it wasn’t. Neither of those tells you anything about Italian agents as a category. It tells you about those two people.
The same is true, incidentally, on the other side of the fence I stand on. I see buyer’s agents, lawyers, consultants and property finders of every level of seriousness — some rigorously licensed, transparent about who pays them and why; others operating with no qualification at all, sometimes quietly holding their own listings on the side while claiming to represent only the buyer. An unlicensed abusivo doesn’t stop being a risk just because he’s calling himself a buyer’s agent instead of an agente immobiliare. The label isn’t the safeguard. It never was.
What actually protects you isn’t a blanket verdict on a nationality or a profession. It’s a short, specific set of questions, asked before you trust anyone with a transaction this size. Whose interest are they representing — yours, the seller’s, or, both (as required by Italian law for real estate agents)? Are they actually iscritto to the relevant camera di commercio, or operating without the license the law requires? If they call themselves a buyer’s agent, do they also hold listings of their own — because if they do, “working only for you” is a claim, not a fact. None of this is complicated to check. Almost nobody checks it.
I understand why “don’t trust Italian agents” travels well online — it’s simple, it flatters the listener, and it gives a foreign buyer a clean enemy in an unfamiliar system. But the buyers I’ve watched get hurt weren’t hurt by a category. They were hurt by one specific unlicensed operator, or one agent cutting corners, who could just as easily have been a buyer’s agent with a nicer accent and a worse conflict of interest.
So my question for you, if you’re choosing who to trust with this: not “Italian agent or buyer’s agent” — but who exactly is in front of you, what are they actually licensed to do, and whose name is on the interest they’re protecting.
If you’re not sure how to check any of that for someone you’re already talking to, it’s a five-minute conversation, not a research project — happy to walk you through it.