Debra Kamin
speaker
405 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Debra Kamin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So to take you back to the settlement, we actually have to go back a little bit further to October of 2023, when the National Association of Realtors, which is the trade organization that really oversees the real estate industry, they are the largest trade group in the United States. They are hugely powerful.
They have a ton of money and a really massive amount of power and influence because of their lobbying arm.
The word realtor, yes. It is a trademark of NAR. So you can only use it if you are a member of this group. And they have a lot of members, 1.5 million. They have more members than there are houses for sale in the U.S. So we're talking a very big, very powerful group. They were sued by a group of home sellers in Missouri.
The idea behind the lawsuit was that their rules had essentially fixed prices on real estate commissions, inflated them, and made it so that real estate commissions were higher than they should have been. They did not expect to lose this lawsuit, but they did lose this lawsuit. And a jury agreed that they were fixing prices on real estate commissions.
Yeah, the dreaded 6%. It comes out of your pocket if you're selling. And anyone who's ever bought or sold a house knows that when you sit down with your agent, it's overwhelming, it's confusing, and it gets wonky. No one really asks, how are these commissions paid? It's just kind of there. Right.
And you also have enough things to worry about that you don't get into the weeds about how these commissions are paid. But for real estate agents, for realtors, this is how they make their living. This is very important. It's literally their bread and butter. And this settlement was meant to shake up the system of how those commissions are determined and how they're paid. Right.
We are wandering the desert now. Absolutely. Most importantly, it was meant to say, this is the way it's been done for a long time. The way it's been done has actually...
That is what economists predicted because commissions are actually baked into home sale prices. When you sit down with a realtor before you sell your home and there's all this paperwork and all this mumbo-jumbo, one thing you generally do is you have a conversation. This is how much commission you're going to pay me as your agent.
So as a result, we're going to set the price for the home here so that when that commission is paid out, you still take home as much as you want.
And if commissions go down, if you're only paying 5%, a 1% reduction in home prices across the board in the U.S. is a massive dent in the housing market that actually really should open things up for a housing market that is so tight and so restrictive for so many buyers.
So we were really optimistic that it was going to change things.
I call it the great real estate workaround. Hmm. Very intriguing. Thank you. Explain. The settlement was designed to take away these conversations that agents were having about commissions. These conversations were happening over these channels, these databases. They're called MLSs, multiple listing sites.
Exactly. It's where home listings live on the internet. And if you're an agent and you're working with a buyer and you're looking for houses, you go to the MLS to see what houses are for sale. But each listing has information on it. The address, the square feet, etc. It also used to have a commission amount.
Yes, almost universally.
The seller pays the commission to their agent, and that agent for the sellers then splits that commission with the buyer's agent. Right. That's how it has been done for a long time. And MLS just kind of laid it all out. Yes. And the key focus of the settlement was that should be no more. Moving forward post-settlement, the rules said that sellers pay their own agents, buyers pay their own agents.
If you work with a real estate agent, it's up to you to pay them. That was what was supposed to happen. which should have brought a lot more competition and negotiation into the marketplace. What workaround could work around that? Well, the settlement was very specific in its language, that these conversations about splitting commissions could not happen on these databases.
So the real estate community was like, okay, we'll just move these conversations elsewhere. It never said we can't have them at all. And I don't mean this is happening in secret.
Just a few days after the settlement.
The president of NAR made a video that went out to every realtor in the group.
That said, to move these conversations.
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