News

23267 readers

3017 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.

2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.

Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.

5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.

7. No duplicate posts.

If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

9. No link shorteners.

The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.

10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

210

The 6% commission on buying or selling a home is gone after Realtors association agrees to seismic settlement (www.cnn.com)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by MicroWave to c/news

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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/

But how many mortgage lenders should you apply to? The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) recommends that you contact “at least three lenders” on your shortlist.

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.

[–] Chocrates 6 points 7 months ago

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.