Powerful Realtor Group Agrees to Slash Commissions to Settle Lawsuits
nytimes.comThis is long overdue. I've seen no difference in realtor quality or effort from selling a $500k house than a $1M house, yet the commissions were doubled just because they can.
Attn Realtors™: Time to provide added value for money like the rest of us working stiffs!
I never envisioned a day when the trend of monopolization across different sectors of economy (at least in the US) would be reversed. But this could be huge, or to quote the article - "The opening of a free market for Realtor compensation could mirror the shake-up that occurred in the travel industry with the emergence of online broker sites such as Expedia and Kayak."
Rooting for more such monopoly busting across different sectors.
I also root for monopoly busting, but worry that the travel and real estate industries are relatively easy sectors to target compared to the real monopoly companies (Meta/Twitter/TikTok, Amazon, Apple's walled garden). The power in those older industries is fairly distributed across a large number of companies and individuals, so coordinated lobbying is more challenging (even for Realtor Association). Shadowy cabals are easier to maintain when fewer people have real power (you don't even need the shadows or the cabals!). Furthermore, customer's interact with them fairly infrequently.
Compare the older industries to TikTok's recently demonstrated ability to shutdown access to congressional representatives on topics other than keeping regulator's and legislator's hands off the company. The power difference is obvious regardless of how you feel about the debate around TikTok.
Social media platforms are definitely not a monopoly. A new one springs up every few years and the next generation wants to be on a shiny new platform which doesn't have their parents. Myspace -> FB -> WhatsApp -> Snap -> Tiktok -> ...
FB survived so long only because they could acquire Insta and WA. One thing regulators have to do would be to not let incumbents acquire new upstarts. And looking at the current trends, that is far more likely than not (see Adobe + Figma).
Will this result in buyers paying for their own Realtor? I have found the fact that the seller pays the buyers realtor fee crazy. I think a lot buyers would go with out a realtor, if they had to start paying for their own realtor.
In Australia there’s no such thing as a buyer’s agent, just the seller’s agent (called a listing agent).
The concept of a buyer’s agent was really odd to me when we moved to the US and started looking for a house to buy..
Can I now sue my realtor to claw back commission I had to pay on the purchase and sale of a house?
There are already class action lawsuit notices about this being sent out to anyone that has bought or sold a home in the last few years in some states. (I know, I received one.)
Cool! I wonder if it's just sellers (since sellers technically pay the commission for buyer and seller in my area, at least) or if buyers can also get $3.47 or whatever's left after lawyers.
Realtors are useless. My attorney was critical, but my realtor did not that much.