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
That video was backed up by NAR's head of legal, who has doubled down on the idea that in the settlement, the language says these conversations are banned only on the MLS.
Michael, it's gotten a little bit wild. I've spent the past year following this very closely, talking to agents, talking to industry insiders. Remember, the 6% was split 50-50. So usually the seller and the buyer's agent would each get 3%.
I've heard stories of agents who, in listing photos, are putting three cookies on the kitchen table as a sign to a buyer's agent, if you bring a buyer, you'll get 3%, which means they'll get their 3% also. Oh, wow. That's quite...
It's one way to put it. I've heard other stories of agents who've put movies on the TV screen in the living room.
During a showing or even in the listing photo, there's a movie playing, but it's a movie that has three in the title, like The Three Amigos.
Yeah, some of them are much more old-fashioned. We're talking emails, phone calls, text. Some of them are really tech-savvy. There's one agent in Virginia.
It enters all the homes they have for sale into their separate non-MLS site, compiles their data, and includes the commission.
There's data that says that people who use real estate agents tend to get a higher price. There it is. There could be confounding variables to that data. Those people could have more money, could have higher priced homes. There's all sorts of things. But yes, there is a lot of data to back it up.
Yes, and it's important to understand this is not happening organically. In many, many ways, real estate agents are just doing what they've been told by the National Association of Realtors to survive in an industry that is cutthroat. Again, we're talking more agents than listings. There are not enough houses to go around. And agents do not work for companies. They're independent contractors.
They pay their own taxes. They split their commissions with their brokerages. For the people on the ground, this really is... a life or death moment for their career. So they feel we're being told we should have the conversations elsewhere.
Why would they not, right? It's their job. But if you talk to the legal team that argued the settlement, they would say sharing is caring unless we're talking about real estate commissions and then sharing is collusion. And the real losers are home sellers because the settlement was supposed to drive down prices.
Initial data shows that these workarounds have been very effective at preventing the reforms. There have been a handful of studies in the real estate industry looking at how commissions may or may not have moved. The data is problematic because most of them are being carried out by people in the real estate industry, so they have a vested interest in the data.
That makes the data less than reliable for reporting processes. But one study by one real estate media company showed that in the months after the settlement, commissions dropped about half a percentage point across the board, which is a lot of money. It's not this watershed that we thought was going to happen, but it's something.
Two other studies, one was carried out by Redfin, which is also a brokerage, and one was carried out by a real estate accounting technology company, so they have a vested interest in this data, say commissions haven't moved at all. So the American home seller is not getting any relief at a time when they desperately need it.
So we can use that data, but we don't want to rely on it because of the conflict of interest. What is more telling are the conversations I've had reporting on this for the past year. I've talked to dozens and dozens of home sellers and buyers.
Yeah. So this is anecdotal data, but there's a lot of it. And they are all telling me that not only are there workarounds, they're more aggressive than ever and they're more frustrating than ever. Some sellers are so frustrated that they're saying, I'm just going to go it alone. I'm going to sell my house on my own and cut realtors totally out of the equation.
Find a workaround around the workaround. A workaround around the workaround around the workaround. But, you know, Michael, you used a biblical reference earlier about Mount Sinai. I'm going to use another one.
We're really in a David versus Goliath sort of situation where you have these individual sellers who want to sell their very valuable asset and an entire industry of realtors who are very committed to maintaining this status quo, mobilizing together to fight them every step of the way and make it extremely difficult to work around the system.
Michael, let me tell you about one of them.
His name is Mike Chambers. He's a home seller in Boulder, Colorado.
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