When Mike Chambers was ready to sell his home in Boulder, Colorado, last month, he interviewed a handful of real estate agents who promised that he could obtain $ 2.75 million or more if he appeared with them.
But the promise would have a cost: each agent wanted to pay a commission of at least 5 percent, or $ 137,500.
Frustrated that not a single agent was willing to move on the rate, Mr. Chambers, 39, decided to sell his home on his own, and turned to social networks with the mango @realtorshateme to narrate the process. Its reels attracted 50,000 views or more.
In a matter of days, local agents were making their own publications on social networks that counteracted their points, an action that Mr. Chambers described as an aggressive campaign aimed at preventing him from making a sale on his own.
Call it the recoil of the real estate agent.
A year after the National Association of Real Estate Agents agreed, as part of a legal agreement, to change a key rule on real estate commissions, a rule that had maintained a tradition of commissions between 5 and 6 percent, has changed little.
What was acclaimed as Cuenca has produced so far a mere drizzle.
Some economists predicted that the change of rules would change the business model and take competition to a long -term market, breaking the standard rate of 6 percent – One of the highest rates in the world, and force housing prices as a result.
Although the average commissions seem to be slipping, industry’s guard dogs say that real estate agents and their stockbrokers have used solutions and pressure on vendors such as Mr. Chambers to subvert the agreement. Until now, they are finding success.
“The industry understood the threat to the rates of 5 or 6 percent immediately, so it sought opportunities to discourage negotiation,” said Stephen Brobeck, the main member of the Washington consumer policy center in Washington, DC, which has expressed the need for greater consumer awareness in the real estate industry.
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 that payment with the agent who brought a buyer, usually with 2.5 to 3 percent for each.
The commission’s division rate communicated in the private databases available only for agents, called multiple listed services, and in the demand that led to the agreement, a group of homes sellers in Missouri argued that the undercover exchange of tariffs led to a lack of transparency on who and how much, the housing 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.
After a postponement of six months, the change of rules Nar was made official in August 2024. The average commissions fell from 5.64 percent to 4.96 percent in the following months, which means a drop in the commission of $ 2,870 in a medium price house, according to a survey of 1,300 agents made by Rismedia, a real estate media company. (Two other studies, conducted by the Redfin online broker and the Real Estate Accounting Firm based on the Accounttech cloud, discovered that the commissions have not changed, but those results could be considered biased because both organizations have a participation in the results).
“The system has been in force for 100 years. He will not change overnight, ”said Michael Ketchmark, the lawyer who represented the owners of Missouri. “It’s not like one day we started broadcasting movies and then great success video stores had suddenly left. It was a progressive slow change in technology and that is what we are witnessing here. ”
Many agents say that since the agreement, they have felt cornered by buyers and vendors equally to defend their value. Jeremy Larsen, a real estate agent in Dallas, said that consumers who decide to navigate in the local market without an agent are taking great risks with their money.
“It’s like entering a court room without a lawyer. Why would you do that? There are so many possible things that can go wrong, ”he said.
Sellers who want to sell houses on their own “can sit in Zillow all day,” he said, but believes that without an agent’s guide, most of them would put a price too low or would hesitate in the negotiations. And buyers looking for a mortgage may not choose the right lender.
“It is such a critical purchase for people, and there is no one in your corner,” he said.
A viral video of Instagram, created last month by a real estate agent in Fresno, California, with 114,000 followers, shows a man who drives through a alley without problems and finding the agent of a seller standing out of a house for sale with a signal that reads “0 percent”, referring to the amount of commissions that sellers were willing to pay any agent who brought a buyer.
“Demons, no,” says the narrator.
In the house next door, also for sale, an agent has a signal that says “3 percent.” The man stops and says he would like to take a look.
The video may have been a joke, but its message was clear: many agents, now prohibited by making commission offers between private databases only of real estate, are not adapting to the intention of the agreement. Instead of encouraging buyers to negotiate rates on their own, they continue to press sellers to offer commissions of 5 or 6 percent, and then discuss the divisions of the commission between them.
These commission divisions are happening largely to the old form: telephone, email and text message. In a Tiktok video seen by The New York Times, a real estate coach in Virginia with 60,000 followers, trains their spectators on how to build a destination page for each of its listings that sends automated messages to the agents of the buyers who inform them about the commission they will receive if they bring a buyer.
“He only really took a matter of weeks, for most agents find an escape. It is almost a joke “ Nick AUFENKAMP said, a real estate agent in Washington who began a coaching business, the Bricket Buyers Academy, after the agreement to help buyers learn how to represent themselves in real estate transactions.
“There is a great reluctance to see any change in this industry,” said Aufenkamp. He estimates that he has trained 30 customers who wanted to represent a purchase of a house and ran into a wall.
The National Association of Real Estate Agents “is resolutely opposed to any attempt to avoid the agreement,” said a spokesman, Troy Green, who added that any attempt of the agents to influence the decisions of the buyers or vendors to obtain more commission “is not equally something that Nar leads.” The organization has an information sheet on its website that explains that address is a violation of its ethics code.
But Mr. Green added that the settlement “expresses” agents “to communicate commission offers with each other in places outside the MLS databases.
And there is the rubbing, said Doug Miller, a Minnesota lawyer who five years ago presented one of the first lawsuits for commissions inflated to Cohen Milstein, a law firm in Chicago.
“The Nar settlement resolves the direction of the MLS. He did not solve the address, ”he said. “Sharing is affectionate. Unless you are a real estate agent, and then it is collusion. “
Some agents have resorted to the legislative process to protect the exchange of commissions. A few months after Nar lost his lawsuit, Oklahoma’s state senator, Paul Rosino, a former corridor, co -crocked a bill that required agents on both sides of a transaction to share his written fees. With the support of the influential real estate association of Oklahoma, that bill approved, and entered into force in May.
The New York Times interviewed 15 buyers and vendors throughout the country, from Colorado to Ohio, Arizona and beyond, who said they were blocked from the market when they tried to negotiate commissions or navigate in transactions without a real estate agent.
In Boulder, the list of Mr. Chambers’s house caught the attention of a local real estate agent, Lindsay Alfano. Mrs. Alfano, 25, has been agent for two years. She said that Chambers had promised to pay the commission of agents of a buyer, and told other agents of her brokerage, Exp, that she planned to show the house to her buyers.
He received text messages mocking her and encouraging her to change course. The New York Times reviewed the messages.
“You’re working for free,” said a colleague.
“Sell your own listings,” another wrote. “This is shameful.”
Mrs. Alfano described the reaction of her companions as a revealing. “The number of people who were so afraid that this guy had access to what we do was a rude awakening for me,” he said in an interview. “The word is direction. If you are worried how much they will pay you based on the house that your client loves, you are doing it for the wrong reasons. ”
Mr. Chambers found a buyer in early March and his house is now in contract. He is now concentrated, he said, in building a new company that says that “the real estate industry will interrupt.”
“I wanted to pay someone for their services, of course, but I don’t want to just light money in flames because there is a system that forces me to do it,” he said.
