- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- economics
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- economics
The 6% commission, a standard in home purchase transactions, is no more.
In a sweeping move expected to reduce the cost of buying and selling a home, the National Association of Realtors announced Friday a settlement with groups of homesellers, agreeing to end landmark antitrust lawsuits by paying $418 million in damages and eliminating rules on commissions.
The NAR, which represents more than 1 million Realtors, also agreed to put in place a set of new rules. One prevents sellers’ brokers from setting buyers’ agents’ compensation, which critics say led brokers to push more expensive properties on customers. Another ends requirements that brokers subscribe to multiple listing services — many of which are owned by NAR subsidiaries — where homes are given a wide viewing in a local market. Another new rule will require buyers’ brokers to enter into written agreements with their buyers.
The agreement effectively will destroy the current homebuying and selling business model, in which sellers pay both their broker and a buyer’s broker, which critics say have driven housing prices artificially higher.
I think that the system for determining down payments and mortgage rates is probably okay. That market should be competitive – if a lender is demanding an unreasonable amount, a buyer can go somewhere else, same as any other market.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/how-many-mortgage-lenders-should-i-apply/
In such an environment, I’d expect that it’s hard for there to be collusion to artificially drive fees up. They’d have to have some way of preventing competing lenders from entering the market.
The down payment discourages a buyer from defaulting, so I suppose if lenders expect high down payments in a given situation, they expect a high risk of default. Maybe they assess the risk of the post-sale price falling as high, for example. Saying “I want 20% down” is the lender saying “I think the price might fall 20% and if so, I don’t want to be the one left holding the bag. You, the buyer, can eat the first 20% of price drop, and only after that will I start to be exposed.”
I think that if lenders are wary of lending to buy something without a large down payment, I might be wary of buying it too, as a potential buyer.
Might be interesting to see what the correlation is in historic spread in offered mortgage rates for various down payments with historic price movements of houses over some subsequent fixed period of time. If a lender can do a good job of predicting price movements, then one would expect them to have a higher down payment more-significantly reduce lending rates prior to situations where the price of the property falls.
Lenders these days lack nuance and are beholden to large corporate rules that are there to protect them. What you are saying is good but I don’t think it exists.
But I have not been able to afford to buy a house so I have no idea.