Not a scam usually a kickback or nepotism and it exists in every industry. It does get factored into the price of the home so the buyer is certainly paying for it so in that sense you could call it a scam.
Like personally, if I sell a $1MM house, I’ll typically get 2.5% - $250 - 50% in brokerage office fees.
So It looks like this:
$1MM House
$24,750.00 Gross Commission to my office
$12,375.00 Gross Commission to me.
$6,000.00 net to me after taxes and expenses.
So seller pays 50k and I get 6kish.
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As with all transactions price is negotiable. If you walk in sans agent and the builder doesn’t have to pay 3% and you offer 3% less, chances are you’ll get that 3% less. It’s like paying cash vs a credit at gas stations. The cash price is cheaper.
You pay your brokerage 50%? That’s obscene. Just texted my friend that’s an owner broker and he does 80/20 for his top producers. Even newbies are 60/40 he said
Ehhh, new home builders love unrepresented buyers. But it’s really bad for new home buyers cause in my state, they tend to use custom contracts, which means that there’s a lot more room for buyers to get screwed. They also require in house financing, large deposits, etc and worse case is that many buyers don’t even have an attorney to look over the custom builder biased contract.
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My split is anywhere from 50-80% to me depending on how much I sell/buy. It makes sense for me to get a smaller split since I care more about the support (signs, notary, E and O insurance, etc) since I barely do any clients besides me and close friends/family and my broker allows me to do what I want (no office hours, no/super low commissions on my own properties I sell/buy/rent, etc). I’ve been allowed to do $0 commission deals for 2 of my personal listings lol
Even at 80%, you’re still making less than 10k after taxes, expenses, fees etc on a 1MM house.
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No, it does not. The media works for the administration and it wants you to think that.
Investors bought nearly a quarter of U.S. single-family homes that sold last year, Every 3rd and 4th house in north america owned by Investment funds, banks, hedge funds, Vacation/Airbnb Etc. U.S. housing inventory reached a record low, Average interest rate is %7.5+ Yet, people cry about agent commission…
The average person has no clue how a house transaction works and the average person won’t buy/sell more than maybe 5 houses in their lifetime (and that’s probably being generous). The realtors basically hold their hand and walk them through the process. But some realtors actually have no clue what they’re doing and are just winging it… I had to literally write my own offer because a newbie realtor couldn’t figure out how to put in seller credit and waive inspection without his broker 
Sorry dude, that’s nuts. That’s an easy offer to write lol. Our office does have premade clauses for common situations like that. We add them to our standard contracts. Not as good a custom legal one but then again, a custom sales contract is like 5k to 10k lol.
This is grreattt 
This has to be one of the lengthiest individual postings that I have seen on LH (in the top 10 for sure). Did you really just copy & paste that entire book into this thread.
15+ years I’m sure you’ve seen a thing or two. What is the craziest situation that you can recall? Would you get into the game again, knowing what you know now?
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I’ve heard of this before and it is insanity
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Ha - it was my own fault for going to an open house and then deciding to just write an offer that day in a market where I didn’t have a go-to agent already 
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That’s why you need me as your agent /s 
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Realtors are the stockbrokers of travel agents.
The yearly fee here in California and the brokerage involvement is why I haven’t taken a realtor exam myself.
The fine print says:
We define an investor as any buyer whose name includes at least one of the following keywords: LLC, Inc, Trust, Corp, Homes. We also define an investor as any buyer whose ownership code on a purchasing deed includes at least one of the following keywords: association, corporate trustee, company, joint venture, corporate trust. This data may include purchases made through family trusts for personal use.
We analyzed home sales in the 50 most populous metro areas, but only included 39 metros in this report due to non-disclosure of sale prices in some counties. The national figures in this report represent an aggregation of those 39 metros.
That’s fine though I also invest in RE not hating the players just pointing out that there are many reasons to complain about the real estate industry in 2024, agent commision is much small issue in this Pyramid.
So really 25% of homes in the biggest cities were investment properties. And of that 25%, a not insignificant amount were really for personal use but bought via a family trust, but counted as an “investment”.
But that doesn’t fit the narrative. So we’ll just go with 25% of Homes are owned by BLACKROCK!!! Makes for a much sexier headline.