Real Estate Changes from NAR Settlement

[All my blog posts are written without the assistance of AI. I have nothing against it, I’m just weirdly proud of that.]

Welp.

There’s been some changes over the weekend. 

If you listen to the news, they may be making it seem like it’s the end of the world as we know it and the real estate industry is on the very precipice clinging to the edge of its existence by a mere fingernail, one stout blow from a bad press report away from impending doom.

But then again, they say that about everything.

While this may be true of some brokerages across the nation (although, really?), it by no means paints the entire picture of the industry. I may just be in a relatively calm brokerage, but to us the sky isn’t falling.

If you’re wondering what all the hubbub is about at ALL, you’ve come to the right place.

Welcome 🙂

Over the weekend the NAR settlement went into effect, meaning as agents we have to have a signed agreement with a client before we can take you to see any property, any where. This isn’t a big deal to Better Homes agents, we were doing that anyway. The biggest change for us is the agreement has to be signed before we take you to see any property at all. It was a common practice to show one or two homes to someone before asking them to sign anything, just to see if the two of us worked well together and if we wanted to continue the business relationship. Now that’s actually, legally, not allowed anymore.

Now, the agreement can just be for a day, a week, and hour, or even property specific, so that should stand to calm some nerves about the changes. But it does remain, the agreement does have to be signed for some specific period of time.

The other change is to do with the responsibility of compensation.

Granted, and this is what sets alot of people in the real estate industry’s teeth on edge, it’s ALWAYS been negotiable. From the amount, to who pays, that language has always been a part of the contracts (at least in Georgia it has). Now it’s just more high profile and in the news, but those things have always been negotiable. Has there been some agents who were bad apples and maybe didn’t explain this correctly, if at all? Yes, of course. But it’s never been a hidden fact, or something we were trying to use to fleece unsuspecting homeowners or inflate home prices themselves, baking the compensation into the listing price (home prices are based on what the market will accept, not what an individual agent wants to bag)

(I don’t even know how one would DO that)

(Some agents must have, otherwise there wouldn’t have been a lawsuit, but still…).

So now it’s more explicit that we choose if the seller is going to be responsible for compensation, as historically has been the case, or the buyer. I won’t get into the politics of this, but I’ll just say those are the facts. 

And before you go saying, ‘Who needs a Realtor anyway??’, 89% of both buyers and sellers used an agent in 2023. The robots may be coming for us, but they ain’t arrived yet.

Do you have any questions? If so, drop a comment!

Until next time.