Listen. The National Association of Realtors cut a deal last year — August 2024, the new rules kick in — and every homeowner from Maui to Maspeth starts doing the same arithmetic. Million-dollar house. Six percent commission. That’s sixty thousand dollars walking out the door in a briefcase that ain’t yours. So when the settlement says buyer’s agent compensation gets decoupled from the seller’s listing agreement, people hear one thing: cheaper. They hear it because they want to hear it. I understand the impulse completely.
Here is what the ruling actually did. Before August 2024, the seller’s agent posted the commission on the MLS and that number covered both sides — listing agent and buyer’s agent, bundled together, take it or leave it. The NAR settlement, which resolved a class-action antitrust case, broke that bundle. Now the buyer’s agent has to negotiate their fee separately, directly with their client, in writing, before they show a single house. The seller is no longer automatically on the hook for the buyer’s representation. On paper, that is a structural change. In practice, in a market where inventory is tight and buyers are already squeezed, a lot of sellers are still offering to cover the buyer’s agent concession anyway — because their listing agent tells them it helps the deal close and they believe it, because mostly it’s true.
Now here is where I got to be honest with you about my own situation, because that is the kind of reporter I am. My cousin Paulie has a truck — borrowed, technically, from his brother-in-law — and Paulie had a read on this whole commission thing. His angle was simple: he knows three agents in Canarsie who will list for two percent flat, and if we drive out to open houses on weekends and hand out their cards in the parking lot, we split a referral fee three ways. Guaranteed money. Paulie ran the numbers on a napkin. I ran them again on my phone. They added up fine both times. We borrowed the truck on a Saturday, printed the cards at the FedEx on Flatbush, and drove to four open houses in Bay Ridge.
The thing about the new rules is that agents are not exactly in a generous mood when a man in a borrowed truck hands out competitor business cards in their parking lot. I will leave it at that.
Back to the actual story. A seller with a million-dollar Maui property should expect listing agent fees in the range of two to three percent now, down from the historical three on the sell side, if they shop around and negotiate. That’s real money — ten to twenty thousand dollars of real savings, not hypothetical. But the “commissions are dead” headline is not what landed. The market is still figuring out what normal looks like, agents are still pushing concession language into contracts, and buyers are still confused about who represents them and who they’re paying for it. The settlement changed the structure. It has not yet changed the culture.
As for the truck: Paulie’s brother-in-law wants it back, one of the Bay Ridge agents called the referral arrangement “not how any of this works,” and we are out forty-seven dollars in printing costs and a full tank of gas. The savings, as predicted, did not materialize on our end.