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Last summer, rule changes from the National Association of Realtors, the powerful real estate trade organization, threatened to upend the way Americans buy and sell homes. Some experts predicted the 6% commission, the unofficial fee for buying or selling a home, would be finished.
Now, six months later, as the 2025 spring homebuying season kicks off and the turbulence caused by the new rules has faded, real estate professionals say the actual effects have been muted.
“Paperwork has changed, and I think some really good things have happened in the way most of us discuss commissions upfront with our buyers and sellers,” said Brita Kleingartner, a Realtor in Los Angeles. “But I don’t think that business has changed in any way.”
With mortgage rates hovering around 7% for the last six months and average home prices across the US continuing to rise, the new rules, which took effect in August, had spurred hope that commissions paid to real estate professionals wouldplunge, making homebuying and selling less expensive for average Americans. Last year, TD Cowen Insights estimated that the new rules could cause fees paid to Realtors to fall by 25% to 50%.
Instead, commissions have remained largely unchanged since August, according to a study released this month by real estate platform Redfin. For relatively lower-priced homes that sold for under $500,000, Redfin found that the average commission has increased since the rules took effect.
Representatives from NAR did not provide a comment when asked about the settlement.
Home sellers mostly still offer to pay commissions, Realtors who spoke to CNN said.
“One thing is certain, if the intention was for sellers not to be paying buyers agents’ compensation, that’s a total fail,” said Summer Goralik, a real estate compliance consultant. “It’s continuing as is and just being repackaged in a different way.”
The real estate upheaval that wasn’t?
Two key changes were part of a $418 million settlement announced last March after a series of lawsuits alleged that NAR, which counts 1.5 million real estate professionals among its ranks, had informal rules that propped up the industry’s traditional payment structure. That meant home sellers were typically on the hook to pay a 5% or 6% commission split between their agent and the agent representing their home’s buyer.
The first change required all agents working with a prospective home shopper to enter into a written agreement before touring a property together. The contract is designed to inform buyers that they are responsible for paying their own Realtors if a seller chooses not to cover that cost.
“Now we’re kind of forced to have that discussion maybe sooner on in your relationship with a buyer,” said Kleingartner, the Realtor from Los Angeles. “I think that has been great.”
Some states already required such agreements before August.
The second change bans offers of compensation from being shown on multiple listing services, which are centralized databases used by Realtors to share details about homes for sale. Prior to the rule change, Realtors were accused by some critics of only showing homes where sellers offered the highest commission to shoppers’ agents, though NAR said that practice was always against its rules.
However, Realtors are not prevented from calling each other and asking about commissions under the new rules.
John Reuter, a Realtor in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, told CNN he thought the change had made the home buying and selling process more opaque. Realtors cannot see whether any previous homes in their area have successfully sold while offering a lower commission, which might be useful information to provide to homebuyers and sellers.
“The rule changes were supposed to make commissions transparent, but they haven’t. It’s done the exact opposite,” Reuter said. “If you look at properties, you have no idea what commission was paid on them. Nobody knows what’s going on.”
The settlement terms, including the practice changes, were officially approved by a federal judge in November. However, the settlement still has its detractors.
Tanya Monestier, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, said she plans to file an appeal in the hopes that NAR’s settlement terms get thrown out.
“I’m hoping that the judge takes a close look at this and sees that this was basically a whole lot of smoke and mirrors,” Monestier said. “These were not valuable practice changes, but just cosmetic ones.”
“It’s a sad state of affairs, but I think all of this was for nothing,” she added.
