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Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

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Re: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

#211

Post by ethbr1 »

salamanderss wrote: post #192
ethbr1 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The municipality is on their side because they're overworked. In even the smallest town, if any appreciable percentage of new builds required custom handling... the system would instantly be person-starved and start backing up. Business-as-usual is the fast/efficient path from a paperwork standpoint. Anything odd is (a) discouraged and (b) looked at with annoyance because it takes more time. One reason it's almost al…

My town solved the guilty until proven innocent issue regarding permits by just giving people carte blanche. Imo this is far more rational: if the county can't/won't verify paperwork they should default towards freedom and let the property owner have at it rather than presuming guilt and saying you haven't the money/people to check it. Granted people aren't rich where I live so we'd rather them live in potentially a…

Which country/state? Inquiring minds want to know!

Re: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

#212

Post by tssva »

judge2020 wrote: post #21
ejb999 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - especially for the last few years, when in order to sell a house all you had to do was put in on the market - and then get 10-15-20 offers at or above listing price - no agent deserves a 6% commission for simply getting something listed on zillow or MLS where in recent years, the houses just sold themselves.

> no agent deserves a 6% commission for simply getting something listed on zillow or MLS Typically 3% is seller agent commission and 3% is buyer agent commission - although in the paperwork it's most likely 6% to the seller's agent and the seller's agent offers 3% to the buyer's agent. Although 5% total / 2.5% to each realtor is becoming a bit more popular as of recent, based on the listing I browse.

I don't understand why people don't negotiate more on this. I paid 3.5% total commission (1.5% listing and 2% buyer agent) on the last 2 homes I sold. One in 2012 and one earlier this year. In both cases the homes sold quickly and above asking.

Re: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

#213

Post by LeafItAlone »

salamanderss wrote: post #200
autoexec wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my neighbor doesn't wire their home to code and it burns down and the fire spreads to my house it doesn't matter who is "responsible", I'd still lose my stuff (or my life). Hell, if my neighbor's tree falls into my property and causes damages I can't be sure I'd be fully compensated for my losses. You can take someone to court, but they can't give you what they don't have. People also just don't want to live in sl…

How many lives of man hours are lost from overhead for these costs and compliance? The issue is people enforcing these regulations see the dead bodies from the burned out home but not the dead bodies of the homeless or the kids with less food or the dude with untreated cancer because regulatory costs and materials safety margins sucked away money that could've been spent on other life critical things. At this point i…

> My whole county did this. No inspections. It turned out fine.

Would you be willing to provide us with the name of the county so that we can determine for ourselves how it turned out?

Re: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

#215

Post by pxx »

frumper wrote: post #209
kelnos wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And a lot of it is of dubious value; I think for many (most?) properties, title insurance is a scam. Most houses, especially those built (or at least having changed hands) in the last, oh, 50 years (or more?) should be fine. It also just seems kinda dumb that realtors get paid a percentage rather than a flat fee. On the buyer side, it's essentially the same amount of work to help someone find and buy a $200k hou…

Title insurance is often required by the lender. If I loan you a boatload of money, I want to make sure there isn't any funny business about who owns what when you buy that the borrowed money. If there is funny business, that why I want you to have bought the insurance. Seems as reasonable as home owners insurance on a mortgaged property.

Lenders could internalize this risk, which is miniscule. But mortgages in the United States are a subsidized product. The real problem is that the lender wants to sell the note to Fannie/Freddie, who require title insurance.

Title insurance is a total scam. Title insurers pay 3-6% of their premiums in claims [0]. Compare to auto insurance, which is ~80% [1], or home insurance (~50-70%) [2].

[0] https://www.ceicdata.com/en/united-states/title-insurance-in... [1] https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2023/05/12/72... [2] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

Re: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

#216

Post by xyzelement »

sib wrote: post #127
ralph84 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commission is spelled out in the listing contract between the seller and their agent. The buyer is not a party to that contract and can’t dictate changes to it.

Well, sorta. The contract between the seller and their broker/agent definitely reserves (typically) 3% for the buyer side broker/agent. What happens to that 3% is definitely under the influence of the buyer. We negotiated a 50/50 split of the 3% back to us as the buyer in the most recent house that we bought. I guess we could have instead offered it as an incremental incentive to the selling party to sweeten the deal…

Yeah totally it's the same thing. The bottom line is you now have an extra 3% to "play with" between you, the seller's agent, and the seller that would have previously gone to the buyer's agent. How you split up that 3% depends on who's got most of the leverage in the scenario.

Re: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

#217

Post by fatnoah »

lloyddobbler wrote: post #193
aeternum wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is where the collusion comes in. Many seller agents will simply ignore buyers without a buying agent.

In the U.S., at least, I've never known a seller's agent to do that (having done a good number of real estate transactions). In fact, in my experience I find it to be the exact opposite. Seller's agents are incentivized to not work with buyer's agents, if the situation arises where they're approached directly by a buyer. If the seller's agent is comfortable acting as the intermediary, and recognizing the limits of co…

Correct, and this is something I've used to my advantage before. It's not a huge one, but when all othet things are equal...

Re: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

#218

Post by pb7 »

macNchz wrote: post #186
404mm wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a realtor but I considered selling my home myself once. Two issues I hit immediately: 1. I could not list the home in MLS as That system requires annual fees to use and you need to have a realtor license. 2. You still need to pay the purchasing side’s realtor otherwise they will simply not consider your home for their clients. That’s 3% that’s hard to get any lower. I ended up negotiating my realtor’s selling…

> 1. I could not list the home in MLS as That system requires annual fees to use and you need to have a realtor license. Additionally, if you were to decide to list "For Sale by Owner" and market it yourself, you can submit it to the major aggregators (Zillow et al), but their contracts with the MLS systems often disallow them from mixing MLS and FSBO listings in the same search result set, so the FSBO listings are h…

Further blatant abuse of their monopoly.

Re: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

#219

Post by semiquaver »

conductr wrote: post #162
_ea1k wrote: post #106

The problem isn't just realtors, it is that the whole system is designed to maximize transaction costs. Who cares how much the attorney and loan paperwork cost when they are only 1-2%, you are already paying 5-6% to realtors, ~.5-1% in repair costs, and often a part of the buyer's closing costs too? But if you think about that wholistically, that means sellers are paying 8-10% of the cost of a house every time they s…

My problem has always been with the percentages used on certain things; like commissions. Just make it a flat fee. Things that require agent's time like open houses; bill for that. It's the essentially the same effort on a $100K house and a $500K house and a $1M house. Maybe once you get to $5M+ houses the fees need to increase since this is a different class of RE with much smaller pool of buyers. But still should b…

Is there anything else in real estate that’s normally priced in terms of percentages other than the realtor cut? I’m not aware of any.

Re: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired, Awards Nearly $1.8B in Damages

#220

Post by pxmpxm »

senorrib wrote: post #56
koolba wrote: post #44

Good for them. On the list pointless middlemen, they’re definitely at the top. One of the dumbest parts of the real estate commission scam is purporting the lie that “the seller pays the commission”. Anyone with half a brain knows that if money is coming out of a transaction, it’s a transaction cost being eventually passed onto the buyer.

Anyone with microeconomics knowledge would tell you that it depends on the elasticity on each side of the transaction.

Someone took econ!
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