In late 2023 and early 2024 – the world was coming to an end.
It was scary.
The reason? Everyone seemed to believe that buyer’s agent commissions were soon going the way of the dodo bird, as a result of the NAR lawsuits and the enormous extortion fees paid to trial lawyers (whoops, I meant commission settlements paid by major brokerages).
Many agents were convinced that they’d no longer be able to earn commissions, and many lenders were in panic mode because they lived off of referrals from those agents.
Welp… the dodo bird survived.
Per Inman, commissions are only a tad lower than they were before trial lawyers found another extortion avenue, and they are now higher than they were last year.
In Q3, commissions averaged 2.43%, up from up from 2.32% last year.
Turns out buyers and sellers alike realized that real estate agents more than earn their keep – especially when markets slow down.
The Big Takeaway Though Is This:
The end of the world never seems to happen – and I am starting to get really frustrated because I have been promised so many ends of the world…
In 2023, I wrote this blog: 12 Housing Crashes In 11 Years! How Much More Can We Take?, and discussed all the real estate crash predictions we’d seen since 2008, and how NONE of them happened.
- 2012 – Shadow inventory
- Higher mortgage rates
- Quantitative Easing (QE) ending in October
- Manufacturing recession
- Home prices got back to the bubble high
- No good reason – but darn it, the market’s gonna crash!
- 5% mortgage rates (Start of the bubble crash for sure)
- Home-price growth was cooling off
- COVID-19
- Mortgage forbearance
- 7% mortgage rates
- Historically low housing demand
The shadow inventory (all the properties banks were sitting on and expected to dump on the market) was especially scary, as was the end of QE (the Fed’s bond buying program to keep rates low) in 2014 – and…nothing.
Since then, we were supposed to be very worried about mortgage rate lockdowns keeping inventory way too low forever, and the dollar was supposed to collapse too, pushing rates to 10%… but not so much.
Anyway, I just need to fill my car up with gas by 1990 before we run out of oil. Oh wait, that didn’t happen.
I just need to sit out in the sun one final time before the Ozone hole gets so big that we all die. Oh wait, that didn’t happen.
I just need to move to a farm and become self-sufficient before Y2K ends civilization. Oh wait, that didn’t happen.
I just need to cover my yard with a giant tarp before 1987 so acid rain does not dissolve it. Oh wait, that didn’t happen.
My point: The world ends way less often than the media and click-baiting pundits might have us believe.
