Wow. What a tangle. In Minnesota our standard buyer agency contract clearly indicates that another buyer could be represented for the same property. However, on the issue of interfering with a contract when under dual agency, Coldwell Banker may be toast. The agent who burst into the room with the increased offer should have put her clients best offer on the table in the first place, (hopefully she had it in writing). If she would have done that in the first place, no one would have a complaint. When I first started in real estate,we were trained to handle a multiple offer situation to possibly have 2 offers in our bag signed by our buyers. When the time came for us to present, we were authorized by our buyers to pull out the offer which we believed would put their best position forward. Multiple offers were less common in those days. Listing agents would sometimes have us all together in the same room to present and we could hear the competing offers. The world has changed. Today, a listing agent would ask for the "best" offers to be presented in the first place and would not give an unsuccessful agent a second chance opportunity, expecially if the revised offer wasn't written. In our market, we rarely get a chance to present an offer to a seller in person any more. Listing agents are asking for offers to be faxed and then they sort through the offer(s) and present to the sellers. Obviously, we need to know up front if the listing agent has written a competing offer before we agree to do this, and the professionalism of agents in our market makes this trust possible. It seems to me that the root of all the problems and the litigation in recent years is that "agency" is established under the law at the broker level and not the agent level -- where the real work of representing a clients interests takes place. I'd like to see a proposal for updating and amending the law of agency and if necessary, revised licensing and training to support agents being the "agent" and brokers being the "supervisors" who don't play favorites. The reality is that we have big corporate brokerages today and the idea that the "broker" represents the client is bogus. Good agents do problem free deal after problem free deal and rarely even talk to their broker. My company has 2 co-owner brokers with 170 good agents. About half of the agents home office. The brokers read every contract, but they don't meet clients generally. We need to make the law fit real estate as it is practiced today instead of trying to make real estate fit outdated laws.