NAR Settlement, 2 Years Later: What Actually Changed

By Gregg Tepper

I have been married to my wonderful wife Letha for 30 years. We have 3 children: Max, Alexander and Charlotte. I have been a licensed Realtor in the New Orleans area for 21 years and am the Operator of The Tepper Group with Keller Williams Realty in Mandeville. Our team services the entire New Orleans and Baton Rouge metro areas. Our team of partners has well over 70 years of experience. In the last 2 years we helped 269 families buy, sell and lease homes, land and commercial investments.

Next month marks the two-year anniversary of the National Association of Realtors settlement, the one that changed how commissions work and brought in these buyer broker agreements. If that doesn’t quite ring a bell, or you haven’t bought or sold in the last couple of years, some things have genuinely changed.

And if you caught something about commission rules back in 2024 and then moved on once the news died down, you’re not alone. Let’s fill in the blanks.

In 2024, NAR settled a wave of lawsuits brought on behalf of home sellers over how commissions were set. It was everywhere. Buyers freaked out, thinking they’d suddenly owe their agent’s fee out of pocket, while sellers got excited, thinking they were off the hook for buyer-broker commissions entirely. Neither turned out to be true. But the news cycle ended, people stopped paying attention, and most folks were left with that headline version stuck in their heads, if they thought about it at all.

Here’s what actually changed. There are two big ones.

• First, commissions can no longer be advertised in the multiple listing service. It used to work like this: a seller agreed to a commission, part of it was set aside for the buyer broker, and that offered fee was posted in the MLS everywhere, whether in New Orleans, Miami, or Seattle. That’s now been outlawed.
• Second, buyers now sign an agreement before they ever start looking at homes, one that spells out the fees and what the agent is providing.

What buyers need to know is that a written agreement is the real shift. You sign it upfront, it lays out exactly what you’re paying for, and it can’t be exceeded, so your agent can’t turn around and ask for more in the offer. What usually happens is your agent negotiates their fee into the offer as a seller contribution, the same way buyers have asked sellers to cover closing costs for decades. So really, just one more line of negotiation.

And worth holding onto: over the last year, around 88% of buyers still used an agent, a number that holds year in and year out, before and after settlement. Buyers still want someone in their corner. It saves time and hunting and pecking, and helps with the negotiation.

What sellers need to know is a little different. You might figure you can skip paying the buyer’s agent and pocket the savings. Technically, you can, but here’s what tends to happen. Offer nothing to the buyer’s agent, and you’ve given them little reason to keep steering their buyer toward your home. They may just say, “You liked that other one down the street, let’s go take another look, maybe they’ll cover the fee.” And that really does happen.

So it’s wisest to offer at least something and keep that agent on your side, because if they move on, that’s more marketing time and more of your money going to maintenance and mortgage payments. What we’ve found on both sides is that we can usually get the seller to pay most of the fee we request for our buyers, and for our sellers, we’ve negotiated that number down and saved them money.

So what does the new system actually mean? It’s a new means to the same end. In most cases, we still land at the same destination, where the seller pays most, if not all, of the buyer broker commission. It’s just a different pathway to get there. Now that pathway runs through the offer, buyer-broker compensation is negotiated right alongside price, closing date, inspection period, and closing cost assistance.

If you haven’t bought or sold since these changes took effect and you’re thinking about making a move, it’s worth a quick conversation. Call or text us at (985) 218-5445, email us at TGroup@kw.com, or visit findnolahomes.com.