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

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221–230 of 282 posts

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Property tax.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If kids can't get food that's a problem entirely separate from the costs of an electrical inspector. No one builds a house and then becomes homeless because of how much it cost to make sure it was up to code. I'd agree that those costs shouldn't be excessive, and they may even be higher than they should be right now, but we've got plenty of examples of what deregulated construction leads to and it's never the utopia…

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

#225
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…

aha, so THIS must be the real reason people like Redfin can make money off of giving you a "digital realtor" rather than FSBO uploads alongside the MLS listings. Makes sense, monopoly / oligopoly working as intended. I knew there had to be a reason :/

Thanks for your reply

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

#226
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…

That seems like something the government should stop

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be presented to both parties. It's not a hidden conflict.

Hidden or not it still is one.

I guess my point was, if it’s transparent the seller can easy take that into consideration when evaluating the offers. I’ve never given much thought to an agents opinion once I’m at that stage. I can evaluate the offers, their job is to bring them to me.

If people are out there just doing what their agents say with no questions asked, well, then yeah probably insist your agent doesn’t represent the other party too. That even gets murky given a large number of agents represent a few brands and they’re completely incentivized to have one of their partner agents on the other side of the transaction.

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

#228
post #167
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those examples sound pretty reasonable, what's the issue?

They want to be the reason why the laws are created, they don't want to have to follow them.

I will own this I guess. You are correct to some extent: I don't want to have to follow laws that cause unreasonable expense, when they are created to prevent disaster that I am going to prevent without your oversight. You'll just have to take my word for it: my house is better built than any for-profit house you'll find on the market today. It's for me and my family, of course I would make sure that it is! The wood that I milled is thicker, heavier, stronger than any Yellawood you'll find. Yet I can't be trusted to recognize a board that shouldn't be used as a joist. I have to higher a professional to look at it's fit for use. Which could legitimately be someone that's never worked with lumber before. You have to admit it's insane. By the way they definitely stamp and sell lumber that I would never use in a joist.

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

#230
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.

See: Doordash, Amazon, Apple, Visa, ... for seller side elasticity.

See: Ticketmaster for buyer side elasticity.

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