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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a buyer is there a way to see the commission offered at all, or is it something that we’d have to write into our offer? Our agent, whom we like and trust, sent us a buyers agreement proposing 3% plus a $795 fee. That seems unusually high- we value her time and expertise but 30K for a straightforward transaction seems like a lot, especially when she will get close to that on the sale of our house too. [/quote]

Wow, that's obscenely high. You're incredibly naïve to trust her or any realtor.

The whole point of the settlement is to end price fixing. This means the sellers don't offer a commission to the buyer's agent. You propose a seller's concession payment. The seller can reject, negotiate, or accept your offer. It would be extremely difficult to find a seller willing to pay 3% towards your agent. Most will pay 0 - 1.5% with a few willing to pay 2%. This means that you have to pay for the rest out of your own pocket if you use a buyer's agent.[/quote]

[b]I thought the point of the settlement was to increase transparency? [/b]So basically your realtor is saying she wants 3% and how that is divided between you and the seller is for you to decide. So figure out how much you are willing to pay her and negotiate, recognizing that you will be in the hook if the seller doesn’t want to pay anything. If she doesn’t agree, look elsewhere. Like anything else, you should shop around to find a realtor you are comfortable with in terms of price and service level. I don’t understand posters repeatedly commenting to go unrepresented and hire a lawyer; that may be a strategy but I can’t see it always working at least initially until the market settles.

If a seller knows their home will sell, you can agree to pay your selling realtor less, offer no buyer compensation, and not require your realtor to show because anyone who really wants the house will pay someone an hourly rate to do so. To some degree showing up unrepresented is a signal both in terms of your willingness to pay and ability to get the deal done smoothly. We sold a house that received multiple (double digit) offers last year in Arlington; we chose our buyer based not just on price but their circumstance/history (prior home owner v first time) etc bc we needed the deal to for sure close so we could get in our new house. It activated their escalation clause, but didn’t end up being the most money wise. Generally, as it shakes out though it should start to differentiate the realtors who are worth paying for (and how much) from those who are really useless.[/quote]

The settlement was a compromise to prevent price fixing through the mechanism of commission steering. Commission steering is when buyer agents boycott listings offering buyer commission lower than 2.5%. The idea behind the settlement was, by preventing the advertising of a commission on MLS, buyer agents would no longer be able to "shop" for higher commissions.

There are of course ways around this which is why the industry is still being sued. [/quote]

Didn’t the settlement also have to do with the standardized contract offering 3% to the buyer agent?[/quote]

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by that.

Regarding the "standardized" 2.5%, Moehrl did address the overwhelming amount of transactions where the "negotiated" commissions were 2.5%. If the commissions are negotiable in a competitive free market, how then can it be the negotiated commission is almost always 2.5%? Plaintiffs alleged collusion to fix prices and presented evidence and expert testimony. The Jury agreed.

[quote]
Moreover, contrary to Defendants’ characterization of Plaintiffs’ steering theory as abstract economic theorizing, Plaintiffs offer real-world evidence supporting the presence of steering in residential real estate transactions. Most prominently, Elhauge analyzes data regarding commission rates in the Covered MLSs and observes that commissions clustered around standard rates in each Covered MLS. During the class period, at least 90% of home sales in 17 of the 20 Covered MLSs featured buyer-broker commissions clustered around three standard rates. [b]And 94% of sales in all Covered MLSs compensated buyer-brokers at rates of between 2.4% and 3.0%, with 85.5% of commissions in the Covered MLSs paid at one of four rates within that range: 2.4%, 2.5%, 2.8%, and 3.0%.[/b] [Citations omitted; emphasis added.]

~ Judge Andrea Wood, Moehrl  v NAR
[/quote]

What's remarkable is that those are [i]the Judge's words[/i]. It reads like an advocate for the plaintiffs.

Moving forward, lawsuits bringing this in as evidence can site a Judge.
 [/quote]

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