{"id":21114,"date":"2023-10-18T11:59:22","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T16:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/?p=21114"},"modified":"2023-10-18T11:59:26","modified_gmt":"2023-10-18T16:59:26","slug":"beyond-the-sitzer-burnett-trial-the-burning-crises-coming-for-your-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/editorials\/beyond-the-sitzer-burnett-trial-the-burning-crises-coming-for-your-job\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the Sitzer\/Burnett trial: The burning crises coming for your job"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The gavel banged in a U.S. district courtroom Tuesday morning, kickstarting the opening statements of both sides of the hotly contested Sitzer\/Burnett trial which focuses on allegations a &#8220;conspiracy&#8221; to inflate buyer-broker commissions. <br><br>If you&#8217;re not up to speed, <a href=\"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/board-associations\/the-case-for-realtors-nar-vs-missouri\/\">here is our takedown of the allegations<\/a>, alongside the long-held understanding by people inside the industry (but not always outside of the industry) that all commissions are negotiable (hence the birth of discount brokerages and the like). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">It&#8217;s getting salacious<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Everyone has a dog in this fight. Everyone. Even a random renter in Philly that has never heard of Sitzer, let alone of NAR. In that vein, Inman is doing live updates, and RealEstateNews.com is doing a daily roundup. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For months, we&#8217;ve had fascinating conversations with hundreds of Realtors, brokers, and consumers as we lead up to this historic battle, and here is the pulse we&#8217;ve gathered: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Agents (and brokers) who have practiced for under 10 years<\/strong> typically believe that the most pressing issue in the industry that impacts their practice is a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/08\/26\/realestate\/national-association-of-realtors-sexual-harassment.html\">belt buckle<\/a> (not to minimize what has happened,  that&#8217;s just industry shorthand for it as of today).<br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Agents (and brokers) who have practiced for more than 10 years<\/strong> tend to focus on two things &#8211; unprofessionalism which remains rife among Realtors, but more importantly, affordability. And they&#8217;re frustrated when others are focused on more titillating topics.<br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Consumers<\/strong> typically say that by their power to choose their agent, they know they can go with a cheaper or more expensive practitioner, thereby, they know commissions are not set at any given rate. They also seem pretty apathetic about the entire lawsuit. <br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Association executives<\/strong> typically confide in us that this is the most pressing issue before them, but not because of what the courts may decide, but because of public (consumer) perception. <br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>PropTech firms<\/strong> are responding in countless directions with no consensus readily available, either telling us they see huge opportunity in this moment (since their genetics are typically disruption), or that it doesn&#8217;t impact them at all. <br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Redfin leadership<\/strong> (and others that are following their recycled battle cry) see this as a moment of weakness for associations who are being pulled in various directions by various lawsuits, and have already begun <a href=\"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/editorials\/redfins-evil-genius-the-real-reason-behind-their-breakup-with-nar\/\">picking old scabs to see what bleeds<\/a>. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s quite a spread of sentiment towards this lawsuit where NAR legal is currently arguing agains conspiracy allegations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&#8220;People can&#8217;t see the forest for the trees&#8221;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We recently asked in our private (and very rowdy) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/punkeduprealestate\">Facebook Group<\/a>, what the biggest fire in real estate was. There were several comments and even more DMs, but the focus wasn&#8217;t (and hasn&#8217;t been) on this lawsuit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One broker told me privately, &#8220;<strong>people can&#8217;t see the forest for the trees<\/strong>,&#8221; asserting that what&#8217;s happening economically could wipe out a swatch of practitioners while they&#8217;re blindly popping popcorn and subscribing to drooling sensationalism. <br><br>&#8220;It almost feels like someone is wagging the dog,&#8221; an agent said to us yesterday. &#8220;Lending is becoming difficult, the economy continues to struggle, and <strong>people that want to buy have been squeezed out of the market slowly for years<\/strong>, but people are worried about this lawsuit? Come on.&#8221; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Coral Gundlach, Realtor at Compass in Arlington, VA said <strong>the biggest fire the real estate industry right now is simply &#8220;Affordability.&#8221; <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">NAR&#8217;s Dr. Lawrence Yun has been sounding the alarm on affordability for years now, but it&#8217;s never quite as sexy as other headlines and is often overlooked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Two concepts currently being missed that WILL be referenced going forward<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Gundlach added, &#8220;It will get worse if buyers have to pay commission which looks like where we are heading. Furthering the divide between have and have nots. Also, <strong>getting rid of the imperfect Code of Ethics for a large chunk of transactions, isn&#8217;t going to help anyone<\/strong>.&#8221;<br><br>Her final note references the brokers threatening to leave NAR, following R<a href=\"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/editorials\/redfins-evil-genius-the-real-reason-behind-their-breakup-with-nar\/\">edfin&#8217;s rehashed rally cry<\/a>.  A concise and astute way to summarize how many feel but haven&#8217;t yet found the words for &#8211; you&#8217;ll see this idea referenced more in weeks to come, I guarantee it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Katie Minkus, Owner and CEO, Principal Broker at Hawai\u2019i Brokers noted, &#8220;In all the talk about affordability and buyers having to pay commissions is this &#8211; <strong>mortgages need to change to include the ability for buyers to finance the commissions<\/strong>. Right now it\u2019s \u201cbuilt in\u201d to the purchase price. But it could be separate if the\u00a0mortgage industry (and regulators agree) are able to treat buyer side commissions like closing costs.&#8221;<br><br>This is another concept we believe will be referenced frequently in the future that is currently being overlooked in lieu of sexier headlines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">So what does one do with this information?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because you&#8217;re reading The Real Daily, it means you&#8217;re not a lemming and you wouldn&#8217;t think what I suggest you should anyhow, because you&#8217;re an independent thinker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But what I DO encourage folks to consider is the following: There is admittedly a lot on fire in the real estate industry (and I don&#8217;t know that the National Association of Realtors has ever faced this many lawsuits simultaneously), but well-informed practitioners are growing weary of the popcorn popping. <br><br>Especially when <strong>we can&#8217;t see the forest fire, but we sure as hell can smell the smoke coming towards us all<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With live court action, it is hard to consider other burning fires, but several are coming for the real estate industry but are being ignored.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[254],"tags":[263,1234,2610],"class_list":["post-21114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorials","tag-nar","tag-real-estate-news","tag-sitzer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/10\/AG-Story-1.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21117,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21114\/revisions\/21117"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}