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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

Here's the brief response I offered earlier today when asked what this actual does:

I don’t really expect significant changes. We are in a more balanced market today than when these lawsuits were first filed. Many sellers will find it advantageous to offer buyer agent compensation. If/when we return to a seller-advantaged market, some buyers may need to pay their agents directly, which could involve rolling those costs into their financing. Lenders are more of an expert than myself on any issues in doing that, but it appears to happen in other states already. One of the problems of these lawsuits is the conflation of agency with payment. States - both WA and OR, for example - are working to fix the agency problem that wasn’t made explicit to buyers post-subagency. But, I don’t think there’s any question that buyer’s having to directly pay buyer’s agent compensation will be a higher cost to buyers.

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A bit part of the lawsuit, was that the buyers agent compensation was ONLY visible on MLS to other registered agents.

So, when you were looking online, you had no idea if the houses you found where offering 3% or 1.5% buyers agent commission, but your agent was, and could steer you to the higher paying homes.

> Many sellers will find it advantageous to offer buyer agent compensation

so, now conspired realtors charge seller and not buyer. Still looks broken.

I guess you aren't familiar with this having been the system in most markets for decades?

your guess is incorrect

> I guess you aren't familiar with this having been the system in most markets for decades?

Definitely not in most markets. This is very unique to the US.

Also, what's the advantage of paying someone whose goals don't quite align with yours? And isn't it a massive conflict of interest?

Broken systems linger despite themselves all the damn time, are you really suggesting otherwise?

The system as described is nearly unique to North America. It takes a particularly distorted and unregulated market to allow this kind of anti-competitive structures to arise.

I’ve never been involved with residential real estate in the US, so forgive me if I’m missing something obvious.

Why will it be a higher cost to buyers? At the macro level, aren’t the transaction costs effectively priced in? Is the idea that the home has some absolute value that exists independently of the cost structure of the market it trades in (so the buyer paying commission directly is doing so “on top of” this amount as it’s valued under the status quo)?

Is it mainly a question of categorizing the commission as “a cost” rather than “hidden in the seller’s asking price therefore part of the value of the home”?

Otherwise, why wouldn’t the buyer who now says “I have $100,000, so I’ll buy a $100,000 house” instead say “I have $100,000, and I know my agent is going to charge me around $3,000, so I’ve got to buy a $97,000 house instead”? If that becomes the new norm, wouldn’t all sellers find that people who could buy at $100,000 before can only buy at $97,000 now, and have to price their homes accordingly, making it a wash?

If it were me, I feel like I’d want to hire my agent at a flat rate if I could, to reward them for finding me a better deal rather than incentivize them to make more by selling me more. But then again maybe that’s part of the higher cost to buyers that you mention: maybe there’s no question that buyers’ agents will be able to squeeze the buyers for more commission directly than they presently get out of the sellers?

In the US the seller pays for both the listing agent as well as the buyer’s agent. When you list your house, you agree to a commission for your listing agent and you advertise a commission to co-broke on the MLS listing, which entices buyers agents to show your house (or steer buyers away from it if the commission is low).

I think the biggest impediment to driving down costs to the consumer is the momentum of social convention.

Even for agents at fixed-cost brokerages, they know they can charge 2-3% so they do, and most people don’t know that it’s negotiable.

Honestly just going to do a FSBO if i ever sell. The fact that I pay out 5% of my house price for what is essentially a few hours of data entry work is beyond stupid.

When we bought, the seller's agent apparently spent a good chunk of her fee on little scent dispensers. We were finding those things tucked behind cabinets for months.

So go for it! If you believe you have the ability to market your house successfully, then by all means do so. As a realtor, if I had a house in a market where I don't do business, there is absolutely no bloody way I would try to sell my own home.

The concern is perhaps less one’s ability to “market” a house better than a realtor than it is whether the realtor’s services, both individually and as a combined effort between buyer and seller agents, is worth anything remotely like the fees charged. The answer is clearly no to the latter.

With prices where they are today and the combination of effort and skill demonstrated by the realtors I have worked with—each of whom was highly regarded—I would give them perhaps a 1% commission split between them. In all but the most unusual cases, even that would be an overpayment at a reasonable hourly rate for their education and skill level.

You will likely still need to offer a buying agent commission if you want buying agents to show the house. Still, that cuts the fee roughly in half.

At least some selling agents do a lot more than data entry. They generally pay for photos, staging, and landscaping while the house is on the market. They also research similar houses to position the property in the market and talk to buying agents. A lot of the negotiation can happen before the offer.

You can do most if not all of that yourself and you may do a better job than the real estate agent you would have hired. Doing a good job is a fair amount of work. Most real estate agents cost the same amount, so there generally isn't a price different between a good and a bad agent (unless you count the commission on a higher sale price). If you can find a good one, it is likely worth the cost. A bad one might even decrease your sale price though.

Do you think you can do a better job selling your own house than you can do at hiring a real estate agent?

This seems like a very disingenuous interpretation of the verdict by avoiding "what it said" and then telling us what will actually happen (as though you can predict) or what's wrong with it. If I were a realtor what is wrong with it is it could threaten my fat commissions.

What the jury said was that the national association of realtors colludes to keep agent fees high in a way that violates anti-trust rules.

(edited for grammar)

Dude - any realtor paying attention has been watching this (and other) cases now for years. You think we haven't been monitoring this along with state legislation, Congressional action, MLS rule changes, and all the other things that have potential legal impact to our business and our clients? NWMLS (for those of you in WA) made rule changes over a year ago that were good changes regardless of the outcome of this case, plus the legislature made clarifying agency changes that go into effect in January. We're not the trolls you all think we are.

I think this is unimaginative. More than likely, eventually the US will join most of the world in having no buyer's agents and low seller's agent commissions.

at 6% of the median 500k for a house, they have about 30k reasons to fight that tooth and nail..

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