A client of ours, a doctor in New Jersey, was three weeks into looking at a new-build project in Netanya. He'd been on four video calls with a very pleasant broker, gotten floor plans, gotten a payment schedule, gotten a soft “we should lock in the 7th floor before someone else does.” On the fifth call, almost as a side question, he asked: “By the way — who pays you? Me or the contractor?”
There was a beat of silence. Then: “The contractor, of course.”
He told us afterward that the answer didn't shock him. What shocked him was that he hadn't thought to ask for three weeks.
That moment — when an American buyer realizes the friendly, responsive, English-speaking person showing them apartments is being paid by the other side of the table — is one of the most common conversations we have. Not because anyone was lying. Because the structure of Israeli real estate is invisible from the outside, and nobody in the room has a reason to draw you a map.
So let's draw one.
The four people in the room
Picture the table where a typical new-construction deal in Israel gets done. There are four roles. Three of them are usually filled. The fourth is almost always empty when an overseas buyer is involved.
1. The contractor (the seller.) This is the company building the project — a kablan in Hebrew. They get paid when the unit sells. Their job is to sell units at the highest price the market will bear, on the schedule that works for their financing. That is a completely legitimate goal. It is also not your goal.
2. The broker. The person showing you the apartment. On new construction in Israel, brokers are almost always paid by the contractor — typically a commission of around 1–2% of the sale price, sometimes more on slow-moving inventory. The broker has every reason to be friendly, professional, and informative. They also have zero financial reason to tell you the unit is overpriced, the floor plan is awkward, or that the project two blocks over is a better deal.
3. The lawyer. This one trips Americans up the most. In Israel, you absolutely need a real estate lawyer, and yes — you pay them. So they work for you, right?
Sort of. A real estate lawyer's job is to make the transaction legally clean: review the contract, check the Tabu (the land registry), confirm the contractor's bank guarantees, make sure the indexation clauses are enforceable, file the right paperwork with the tax authority. That is critical work and you cannot skip it. But notice what's not on that list: deciding whether the price is fair, whether the contractor is one of the strong ones or one of the wobbly ones, whether the unit is the right one for your goals. Lawyers don't underwrite deals. They paper them.
4. The buyer-side advisor. This is the empty chair. Someone whose only job is to represent the buyer — paid by the buyer, on a flat fee, never on a percentage of the purchase price. (That last part matters: if your advisor gets paid more when you pay more, they're not really your advisor.) This is the role we play. We're not a broker. We're not a lawyer. We're the person reading the deal on your behalf.
The seller's side of the table
Your side
The asymmetry isn't about bad faith. It's about information — and information is the one thing nobody else at the table is paid to give you.
This isn't malicious. It's how the system is built.
It's tempting, when you first see this layout, to feel like you've uncovered something shady. Resist that. The Israeli market isn't unusual here. American new-construction works similarly — the on-site sales agent at a US development is also paid by the builder, and most buyers there don't have their own representation either.
The contractor is doing their job. The broker is doing their job. The lawyer is doing their job. Each of them is operating exactly as the system expects them to.
The asymmetry isn't about bad faith. It's about information. A local Israeli buyer has, by osmosis, a rough sense of what a square meter costs in a given neighborhood, what Madad (the Israeli consumer price index, used to escalate the contracted price between signing and delivery) typically caps at, which contractors deliver on time and which don't, what a “reasonable” payment schedule looks like. An American buyer has none of that. They're hearing every claim for the first time, with no benchmark to test it against.
That's the gap. Not villainy. Just a missing instrument panel.
What the gap actually sounds like
Once you know to listen for it, you can hear the asymmetry in almost every sentence of a sales conversation. Some examples we hear constantly:
“The 7th floor in this line sold for 3.4 last month.”
Maybe true. Maybe a different floor plan, different exposure, different stage of the payment schedule, different buyer. Without comparables across multiple projects in the same neighborhood, this number is a data point with no context. It sounds like a benchmark. It isn't one.
“The contractor is very reputable.”
Against what standard? Reputable contractors in Israel still vary wildly on delivery timing, on quality of finish, on how aggressively they price change orders, on how they handle defects after handover. “Reputable” is a category, not a grade.
“Madad indexation is standard.”
Yes — almost every contract has it, because between signing and the day you get keys (often 24–36 months later), the contractor's costs move with inflation. The question is never “is there Madad?” The question is: what's the cap? Is it capped at all? When does indexation start — from signing or from a later milestone? Two contracts that both say “Madad-linked” can produce very different final prices.
“We're getting interest on this unit, you should sign by Tuesday.”
Sometimes true. Often a sales technique. Either way, whose deadline is that? It's the contractor's sales cycle, not your decision cycle. A buyer-side advisor's job, partly, is to tell you when the urgency is real and when it's manufactured.
None of these statements are lies. They're just sentences that land differently when you're hearing them for the first time versus the hundredth.
What changes when there's a fourth chair
The point of a buyer-side advisor isn't to replace anyone at the table. The contractor still sells. The broker still shows. The lawyer still papers the deal. What changes is that there's now someone in the room whose entire job is asking the questions you don't know to ask.
Before: you're getting one side of every claim, and your only counterweight is your own gut and a lawyer focused on contract language.
After: someone is pulling comparables across projects you haven't been shown, pressure-testing the indexation clause, checking the contractor's delivery history on past projects, sanity-checking the payment schedule against the construction timeline, and — often most valuable — telling you when a deal is actually good and you should move on it. We're not professionally skeptical. We're professionally honest. Sometimes the unit you're looking at is the right one at the right price. When that's true, we say so.
At Sela, this is the only thing we do. We don't sell units. We don't take referral fees. The buyer is the only person who pays us, and they pay a flat fee, not a percentage. That structural choice is the whole point — it's what makes the fourth chair actually different from the other three.