When the National Association of Realtors settled the Sitzer-Burnett antitrust class action in March 2024 for $418 million and structural changes, the headlines treated it as the end of the 6% commission. Buyer’s agent fees would no longer be advertised on the MLS. Buyers would have to negotiate compensation directly. The cartel, finally, was breaking.
A year and change in, the cartel is mostly intact. Average commissions have ticked down a fraction of a percent. The structure that kept them around 5 to 6% has migrated, not collapsed.
What actually changed in August 2024
The settlement’s two operational changes took effect August 17, 2024. First, MLSs can no longer display buyer’s agent compensation offered by the listing side — the field is gone. Second, buyers must now sign a written representation agreement with their agent before touring homes, specifying the agent’s compensation.
In theory, this decouples buyer’s agent pay from the seller’s listing agreement and forces buyers to evaluate agent fees as a service line item. In practice, most sellers still offer buyer’s agent compensation. They just communicate it through different channels.
The workarounds the industry built
The information moved off the MLS and onto everything adjacent. Agent-only Slack groups, brokerage-internal messaging, third-party “concession” platforms, listing remarks, and a single phone call between the listing agent and the buyer’s agent all now carry the number that used to sit on the MLS sheet. Compass and other large brokerages have built private listing networks that route this information among members. Some MLSs have added “concessions to buyer” fields that, while technically not compensation to the agent, are easily structured by the seller to flow through to the buyer’s agent fee.
Buyer representation agreements have also functioned as a price floor in many markets. Templates from state Realtor associations preset the buyer’s agent compensation at 2.5 or 3%, leaving the buyer to push back against a printed number their agent describes as standard. Most don’t, especially first-time buyers who have never priced this service before.
The DOJ has continued to investigate, and at least one major brokerage faces follow-on litigation. But the federal structural remedy that would actually shift behavior — banning seller-paid buyer’s agent commissions outright, as Australia and the UK effectively do — is not in the settlement and not on the regulatory roadmap.
Where the market actually broke
The thin places in the cartel are markets with high inventory and informed buyers. In some Florida and Texas metros, buyers have negotiated agent fees of 1.5 to 2% or hired flat-fee buyer’s agents at $3,000 to $5,000. Discount brokerages serving informed sellers are taking real share. The savings are real for the people who do the work.
Most buyers don’t. The information asymmetry favors the agent, and the transaction is rare enough that learning curve costs are nontrivial.
Bottom line
The NAR settlement changed the disclosure rules without changing the underlying economics. If you want a discount on real estate commissions, you can get one — but you have to ask, in writing, and be willing to walk. The system isn’t going to volunteer it.
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