The National Association of Realtors agreed to pay $418 million to settle an antitrust suit that showed that they colluded to inflate commissions, block competition, inflate US housing prices, and harm consumers.  The $418 million might seem like a lot, but it’s less that a half percent (.5%) of the $100 billion of real estate commissions that consumers pay every single year!   So why did they settle? Because if they didn’t settle they could have faced a fine close to $6 Billion!  They settled, gave up their right to appeal, and they probably got off cheap.   Thanks for reading Year Of The Opposite - Travis Stoliker's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. But, it’s still progress.   At issue was a few key points that seem to be clearly anti competitive.   For some background, when you buy a house in the USA, in general there is a 6% real estate commission that is typically shared between the agent representing the buyer and the agent representing the seller.   The entire commission is actually paid by the seller of the house.  So if you are selling a house for $1,000,000, $60,000 of your money is split between each realty company. It’s worth noting that this 6% real estate commission is one of the highest in the world.  Most countries it’s around 1-3%! We have been getting screwed and since this fee is fully paid by the seller of the house, it has been artificially inflating the price of houses.   Think about it like this.  If you know you know your house is worth $1,000,000 and that’s how much you need in your pocket to leave your house, the sale price needs to be about $1,063,000 for you to be able to pay out the real estate commissions and still end up with $1,000,000.  There is no free lunch.  That means you will need to inflate the price of the house to $1,063,000. How did America end up with this system?  When you go to list your house, the realtors have a few way of controlling the entire process.   It always seemed like illegal collusion to me, and it looks like the courts agreed.   First is, the realtors themselves were basically required to be a part of the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), the system that lists all the houses for sale.   When an agent listed a house, the rules would require the realtor publish the commission that the buyers agent would get right on the MLS.  And when you went to list your house, the realtor would make you sign a contract that you agree to pay the 6% fee and split it with the buyers agent.   There were some ways around this, but it made it WAY harder to sell your house.   I want to tell you a real story of exactly how it worked.   I have sold 2 houses without using a realtor and I have purchased 1 home without a realtor.   In recent years some services sprung up to offer a way for you to sell a house and have it listed in the MLS by paying a flat fee of between $100 and $500.  It is way less expensive than the $25,000 commission for the average home sale in America.   So why didn’t everyone do this like I did?  Because real estate agents HATED IT and they essentially wouldn’t work with you.  I experienced this myself first hand. Realtors will frequently claim that this never happened and that they would never put their commissions over the needs of their clients.  I know for a fact this was a lie.   When we were selling our house in East Lansing I met with 4 different realtors to list the house.  Only one would negotiate on the commission rate and it was only a slight decrease.   All of them gave me their suggested listing price.   I ended up opting to list it myself on a self serve MLS platform and I decided to market and advertise the property myself.  I took all the pictures and videos and I paid money to advertise it myself.   Our house was listed in the MLS, Zillow, Realtor.com, Facebook, etc.  Just like it would be if it was listed by a traditional agent.   Within a day or two, we showed the