Kirk Downing knows the ins and outs of selling a home: His is a military family, and he, his wife and their two young sons have moved five times in the past 12 years.
So when The New York Times published the story of Mike Chambers, a homeowner in Colorado who tried to sell his house in February without a Realtor, only to learn that local agents were organizing to keep buyers away, it hit close to home.
Mr. Downing was among hundreds of readers who wrote in the comments section or sent personal notes after that article was published, all sharing experiences of feeling forced to pay high real estate commissions. They shouldn’t have had to — a landmark legal settlement involving the National Association of Realtors last year was meant to upend the long-held system of how real estate agents are paid, and by whom. The lawsuit rocked the industry and prompted economists to predict that the settlement would loosen the housing market, foster competition and eventually do away with the long-held standard of 5 to 6 percent as the de facto commission rate paid by sellers.
But one year on, average commissions have dipped by a small amount, with one study showing a reduction, on average, from 5.64 percent to 4.96 percent in the months following the settlement. Other studies show they haven’t budged at all.
Sellers and buyers alike say that some agents are using loopholes to resist real change.
Mr. Downing’s wife, Michelle, is a recruiting officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. She recently received orders to relocate to Savannah, Ga., just two years after the couple bought a new home in Columbus, Ohio, for $425,000. They know they’ll probably lose money on a sale — home prices in Ohio have fallen by an average of $100,000 over those two years, according to Realtor.com, and the couple recently spent $30,000 on improvements, thinking they’d be in Ohio for several more years.
But Mr. Downing, 41, who served a tour in Iraq with the National Guard, said that what stings the most about this sale is not the lost profit. It’s the 3 percent commission he’ll pay to the agent representing a buyer, because, he said, his own agent told him he had no choice. If he didn’t offer it, she told him, no buyers would come to his house.
“The fix is in,” he said in an email.
In an interview, he added that if he doesn’t offer to pay buyers’ agents, they “will blacklist our house, causing it to sit on the market for longer than we can afford.”
Real estate commissions in the United States have long been baked into a home’s listing price and then paid by the seller to their agent. The agent would then split the commission with the agent who brought the buyer, typically with 2.5 to 3 percent for each.
The rate of the commission split was communicated on private listing databases available only to agents, called multiple listing services. In the lawsuit that led to the settlement, a group of home sellers in Missouri argued that the covert sharing of rates led to a lack of transparency about whom, and how much, home sellers were required to pay. They also argued it inflated fees.
A jury agreed, and N.A.R. and the brokerages were ordered to pay nearly $2 billion in damages. The settlement came five months later, with the N.A.R. agreement to end the practice of commission-sharing over MLS databases as part of the deal. N.A.R. also agreed to pay $418 million to settle the claims, and some brokerages separately settled for millions of dollars.
Joanna Sells, a psychologist who works for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, sold her home in Miami last month without a real estate agent. The experience left a terrible taste in her mouth, she said.
Agents representing buyers refused to show her home to their clients unless she promised to pay their commission. In an interview, she said that one agent even texted her to say that he had a buyer who wanted to make an offer on the home, but she needed first to sign a separate agreement with him to pay him. She texted him back with screenshots from the N.A.R. website, explaining the settlement 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 on the market earlier this year before moving her into an assisted-living home. He knew about the N.A.R. settlement, so he asked his real estate agent if he could avoid paying a buyer’s agent commission.
If he did that, the agent said, no buyers would come.
Many longtime real estate agents wrote in, too. Some felt that in the story of Mike Chambers — a wealthy entrepreneur in Boulder, Colo., selling a $2.75 million house — they and their fellow agents weren’t represented fairly. Mr. Chambers told The New York Times how he had interviewed many agents, all of whom wanted him to pay a commission of at least 5 percent, which would have amounted to $137,500.
Frustrated that agents were unwilling to budge on the rate, he decided to sell his house on his own, and took to Instagram to chronicle the process, using the handle @realtorshateme. He then learned that local agents were texting each other, encouraging their colleagues to steer buyers away from his listing.
Piper Menke, a broker in Oregon, said that Mr. Chamber’s experience was not indicative of the entire industry. “You paint this picture of a single white male selling an over 2 million dollar house as a victim, when the story is so incomplete,” she wrote.
“You paint this picture of a single white male selling an over 2 million dollar house as a victim, when the story is so incomplete,” wrote Piper Menke, a broker in Oregon.
“If I had a qualified buyer, I would have absolutely have represented them in this transaction,” she wrote. “Just like with any other trade, contractor, lawyer, consultant, private health care workers, our fees are what we feel we need them to be in order to remain in business while balancing our time and services offered. If we can negotiate down, we likely will.”
But others said they had seen problems in the industry for decades. Pamela Monheimer, who also lives in Oregon, wrote in to explain how she spent nearly 30 years as a commercial real estate agent. Her license is now lapsed so she recently interviewed several brokers to help her sell a home and found that she, too, felt strong-armed into paying both buyer and seller commission, without room to negotiate. “I was horrified by the way they were skirting the new rule,” she said.
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