Kirk Downing knows the ins and outs of selling a house: his is a military family, and he, his wife and two young children have moved five times in the last 12 years.
Then, when the New York Times published the story of Mike Chambers, an owner in Colorado who tried to sell his home in February without a real estate agent, only to know that local agents were organizing to keep the buyers remote, he arrived at the house.
Mr. Downing was among hundreds of readers who wrote in the comments section or sent personal notes after that article was published, all the experiences of feeling forced to pay high real estate commissions. They should not have had to have to have to have a historical legal agreement that involved the National Association of Real Estate Agents last year was destined to turn the long -standing system of how the real estate agents are paid already who. The lawsuit shook the industry and led economists to predict that the agreement would loosen the real estate market, promote competition and eventually eliminate the standard of 5 to 6 percent de facto as the de facto commission rate paid by sellers.
But a year later, the average commissions have been dropped by a small amount, and a study shows an average reduction, from 5.64 percent to 4.96 percent in the months after the agreement. Other studies show that they have not moved at all.
Sellers and buyers say that some agents are using lagoons to resist real change.
Mr. Downing’s wife, Michelle, is an official recruitment in the United States Coast Guard. Recently he received orders to move to Savannah, Georgia, only two years after the couple bought a new house in Columbus, Ohio, for $ 425,000. They know that they will probably lose money in a sale: housing prices in Ohio have fallen by an average of $ 100,000 during those two years, according to Realtor.com, and the couple recently spent $ 30,000 in improvements, thinking they would be in Ohio for several more years.
But Downing, 41, who served a tour in Iraq with the National Guard, said that what they give most about this sale is not the lost profit. It is the 3 percent commission that will pay the agent who represents a buyer, because, he said, his own agent told him that he had no choice. If he didn’t offer it, she told him that no buyer came home.
“The solution is in,” he said in an email.
In an interview, he added that if you do not offer to pay the buyers’ agents, “they will be included in the blacklist of our house, which will cause you to feel on the market for longer than we can pay.”
The real estate commissions in the United States have been baked for a long time at the list price of a house and then the seller has paid to its agent. Then, the agent would divide the commission with the agent that brought the buyer, typically with 2.5 to 3 percent for each.
The commission’s division rate communicated in the private list databases available only for agents, called multiple listing services. In the lawsuit that led to the agreement, a group of housing vendors in Missouri argued that the undercover rate of rates led to a lack of transparency on who and how much, house vendors had to pay. They also argued that inflated rates.
A jury agreed, and Nar and the stockbrokers were ordered to pay almost $ 2 billion in damages. The agreement occurred five months later, with the agreement to put an end to the practice of the exchange of commissions on the MLS databases as part of the agreement. Nar also agreed to pay $ 418 million to solve the claims, and some stockbrokers were resolved for millions of dollars.
Joanna Sells, a psychologist who works for the Department of Veterans Affairs in the United States, sold her home in Miami last month without a real estate agent. The experience left a terrible flavor in his mouth, he said.
The agents who represented the buyers refused to show their home to their clients unless she promised to pay her commission. In an interview, he said that an agent even sent him a text message to tell him that he had a buyer who wanted to make an offer at home, but first he needed to sign a separate agreement with him to pay him. She sent him a text message with screenshots of the Nar website, explaining the agreement and the rule changes. He refused to send his buyer’s offer. (She shared the texts with the New York Times).
Nick Gianaris, who lives in Pittsburgh, wrote that he put his mother’s house in the market earlier this year before moving it to an assisted life house. He knew about the Nar agreement, so he asked his real estate agent if he could avoid paying the commission of agents of a buyer.
If he did, said the agent, no buyer would come.
Many life real estate agents also wrote in. Some felt that in the history of Mike Chambers, an entrepreneur rich in Boulder, Colorado, selling a house of $ 2.75 million, they and their fellow agents were not fairly represented. Mr. Chambers told New York Times how he had interviewed many agents, all of whom they wanted to pay a commission of at least 5 percent, which would have promoted to $ 137,500.
Frustrated because the agents were not willing to move in the rate, decided to sell their home on their own and resorted to Instagram to narrate the process, using the @realtorshateme mango. Then he learned that local agents were sending text messages, encouraging their colleagues to remove buyers from their list.
Piper Menke, a runner in Oregon, said Mr. Chamber’s experience was not an indicative of the entire industry. “You paint this image of a single white man who sells a house of more than 2 million dollars as a victim, when the story is so incomplete,” he wrote.
“You paint this image of a single white man who sells a house of more than 2 million dollars as a victim, when the story is so incomplete,” Piper Menke wrote, a runner in Oregon.
“If I had a qualified buyer, I would have represented them absolutely in this transaction,” he wrote. “As with any other trade, contractor, lawyer, consultant, private health workers, our fees are what we believe we need to remain in business while balance our time and the services offered. If we can negotiate, we will probably do it.”
But others said they had seen problems in the industry for decades. Pamela Monheimer, who also lives in Oregon, wrote to explain how almost 30 years went by as a commercial real estate agent. Her license is now expired, so she recently interviewed several runners to help her sell a house and discovered that she also felt with a strong hand to pay the Buyers and Sellers commission, without space to negotiate. “I was horrified by the way they were avoiding the new rule,” he said.
