if you go to the link I supplied earlier, and follow the links and open the tabs, you'll see there is a case where if you sold after feb 1 2020 you are in the class. Then there is another case where if you sold after a year or so earlier you are in the class. Neither of these cases require you to have sold with a particular MLS.

Maybe the second one is the NAS case. I am mentally juggling so much stuff right now, I simply dumped all of this out of my brain just as soon as I filed the forms.

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Originally posted by wtg:I wouldn't worry about how this affects your purchase price and the future value of the home; there's no way to know that. It's going to take a long time for the effects to be reflected in the market, and we really don't know very much about what those effects will be. Not to mention that a thousand other unrelated things in the market could make a home much more, or much less valuable in the future. Who had the COVID boom on their real estate bingo card?

True dat!

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On the good news side...You will probably be able to collect something from the Burnett litigation because you sold your house last year.

It certainly would seem so, from what I’ve read so far.

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Originally posted by jodi:
I sold a house in 2016 and 2018

Oops. Sorry, jodi. You quoted the beginning/ending dates that are listed in Moehrl, and I remembered them as the dates you sold houses...my mistake....

Thinking back to the last time you sold or bought a house ...

How much do you think the services offered to you by your real-estate broker/agent was worth? How much would you be willing to pay for that had it not been defaulted to 5%~6% in the standard listing contract?

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How much do you think the services offered to you by your real-estate broker/agent was worth?

This is an interesting question ... I think it might be fair to settle on an hourly rate and then do that math based on how much time the agent spends. The problem is, in theory, the agent should be spending time on you even when she's not actually with you... And then there's mileage and other expenses the agent incurs... I think those should be built into the hourly rate.

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How much would you be willing to pay for that had it not been defaulted to 5%~6% in the standard listing contract?

It's not 5-6%, it's 2-3% for the buyer's agent. The seller pays the seller's agent.

In any case, to your question of how much I'd be willing to pay, I don't know, but I don't think the services I've had are worth 2-3% of the home's purchase price, not in any of the transactions I've been involved in thus far, including the one I'm in the middle of.

:/

A three part series on real estate commissions:

https://www.housingwire.com/ar...-estate-commissions/

https://www.housingwire.com/ar...commissions-illegal/

https://www.housingwire.com/ar...-estate-commissions/

I was thinking about what the buying experience was like in 1980 when we bought our house. Listings were in a big catalog-like book published once a week. Or you looked in the classifieds in the newspaper. Listings had one tiny grainy photo of the front of the house. Listing included room dimensions, lot size, and annual property taxes. No Mapquest or GPS back then, so the listing included directions for finding the house. For a house located at 100 Oak Street, it was something like "W on Central Rd to Maple Ave, rt on Maple to Oak , left to home".

Home inspections were not a thing. Even lock boxes weren't very widely used; I can remember having to stop at various real estate offices with our realtor to pick up and then drop off the house key.

Amazing how much things have changed....

Don't forget the Thomas Guide locator:

TG 16 E 15

So it turns out that the NAR settlement was for the Burnett case.

Who knows how many will apply, but if everyone who is eligible applies for the refund, it works out to $8 per claim. pique was right.

Home Services of America (a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate) still plans to appeal.

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Who knows how many will apply, but if everyone who is eligible applies for the refund, it works out to $8 per claim. pique was right.

Wait, where did she write about that? I thought she said $8000?

No, pique said it would be a miniscule check that you might get by the millennium.

I was the one who saw a projection that the average payout was estimated to be $8000; they must have taken a guess at how many people will file claims. Just today I saw the $8 payout number; as usual I forgot to bookmark the site. That assumes that everyone who is eligible files a claim.

eta: I couldn't find the $8 quote, but I finally found an estimate of how many people may be eligible. I'm thinking that the article I saw was estimating how much people could expect from the NAR portion of the settlement.

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As part of the settlement, the National Association of Realtors agreed to pay $418 million over the next four years. That's in addition to $210 million that various brokerage firms had already agreed to pay. Lawyers will get a chunk of that money, but the rest will go to people who sold their homes in recent years and paid what critics argue were inflated real estate commissions. Eligibility depends on where you live, but in some parts of the country, the settlement covers people who sold homes as much as a decade ago.

"We don't know the exact number, but we estimate it to be in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 million" people, says Benjamin Brown, co-chair of the anti-trust practice at Cohen Milstein, one of the law firms involved in the class-action case.

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/22...ssion-homes-for-sale

$628 million / 50 million claims....works out to just under $13....

Short and sweet, what happened and how to file.

https://www.khou.com/article/n...7d-89a2-4072107da120

Thanks, WTG!

Given that it's not likely that I would actually sue on my own (which I assume would be the only other way to get a settlement), I might as well submit.

BTW, WTG, did you have a chance to talk with your friends who are real estate agents? What's their take on all of this?

We just exchanged a couple of short emails. Their observation was that they are primarily listing agents and they didn't think this would affect them very much. They didn't comment beyond that. I'm guessing that most people won't take on photographing, marketing, and showing a property they want to sell, so will hire a listing agent, so my friends may be right.

Listing agents may actually have more work to do....for instance, what if buyers decide not to work with a buyer agent? People can already find properties online, so that's not an issue. Same for finding home inspectors and lenders. But someone will have to let them in the property to show it, and if they aren't working with a buyer agent, won't it have to be the listing agent who does the showings? I do think that people who are primarily or exclusively buyer agents have the most to lose. They will have to convince their clients that their services are worth paying for. I've never relied much on the buyer agent to provide guidance as far as price negotiation, and have never shared my situation in great detail. Call me a cynic, but I always figured that both agents want a deal to close sooner rather than later and that their interests come before mine as far as they are concerned. Their input is of somewhat limited value and I have to watch out for myself.

Buying a house in 2024 isn't the mysterious process it was 40+ years ago when we bought our house...

Interesting.

The logistics of showings had occurred to me. It seems like that's one of the biggest things we rely on our agent for. Much of the rest of it we could do ourselves....

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I do think that people who are primarily or exclusively buyer agents have the most to lose.

Yes, this makes a lot of sense.

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I've never relied much on the buyer agent to provide guidance as far as price negotiation, and have never shared my situation in great detail. Call me a cynic, but I always figured that both agents want a deal to close sooner rather than later and that their interests come before mine as far as they are concerned. Their input is of somewhat limited value and I have to watch out for myself.

This x100!

I hope this is the last time we buy a house for a long, long time. The whole thing is just yucky.