Listing agents here will always prefer someone with no agent so they can more on the commission, I believe that's called dual agent.

I thnk what you miss is that a legitimate broker (iie one with a license) would have loyalty to the principals and full disclosure and honesty paramount to his profit.This is probably why he had to do a dual escrow so the seller wouldn't see he was NOT the buyer and NOT see what price the property was actually being sold for.Have no problem at all with making $25K profit on an actual investment, however, an investment would imply he took title which he didn't. 

I know very little other than a dual parcel that I discovered and ending up picking up.