A landmark settlement from the National Association of Realtors, the country’s largest real estate trade association, could been a boon to home sellers, according to Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman.
The settlement will require NAR to drop a policy that required sellers to pay a 6% commission to be split between the seller’s and buyer’s agents, and it means mean that sellers will keep a greater portion of their home equity, Kelman said. Some lawsuits said the commission policy “violate[d] antitrust laws and inflate[d] the fees paid to buyer’s agents by requiring a listing agent to compensate a buyer’s agent for listing a property on the MLS.”
There is “a real case to be made that consumers deserve a better deal, but the primarily beneficiary will not be the buyer,” Kelman said. “It will be the seller. They will keep more of their hard-earned home equity.”
If the settlement is approved, a home’s listing price won’t change, but it will determine how much of the money the seller gets to keep.
“I think someone moving up will have more money from the last sale of their home to buy their next home,” Kelman said. But “if I’m a first-time homebuyer thinking that prices are going to come down, I’m not sure that’s the case.”
