Don't sign anything until you find the house you want to buy.

You can sign a piece of paper and be locked into buying through one agent.
This can limit your selection especially if that agent is lazy.

I searched for homes in many different cities (within 100 miles) and went to
many different real estate offices. And I feel doing this gave me the widest
selection. At one office I was told I needed to sign a piece of paper before
they could give me any listings. I said "Bye!" and headed for the door. They
stopped me and said they could make an exception in my case.

These people are not your friends. They will give you the shaft with a
quickness. This is business!

Also what I did was to look on the internet. I found that the agents were
giving me higher priced listings which I was qualified for loan wise, but I
wanted something with lower cost/payments - a fixer upper. They wanted to
sell me a higher priced house with a higher commission.

Eventually I found the house I wanted. Then I hunted down the agent the
house was listed with. And then both the seller and buyer (myself) were
dealing with the *same* agent.

And this really helped the sale go through since the owners were out of
state. There were last minute errors in documents to be fixed. Dealing with
just one agent speeded up this process.

With real estate agents and myself, we can play "telephone tag" all day
long - leaving messages on each others machines. So reducing the number of
telephone tag "players" can be a big help if there are last minute errors
which must be fixed "right now", and signatures are needed from both buyer
and seller "right now".

Just before closing, I kept in constant contact with the agent and I advised
the sellers to do the same (the real estate agent told them they did not
need to do anything else!). The day before closing there were two documents
found with errors which needed buyer and seller signatures. (Not to mention
the document 2 days prior to closing and another 4 days prior to closing!)