Today we want to talk about the National Association Realtors lawsuit that everybody heard about that now was settled a year ago. We want to talk about how the market was affected, how it's actually happening out in the real world, how buyers and sellers or interactions with buyers and sellers over the last year, just how all these things have worked. And as we've been meeting more and more of you guys in person from watching these videos, depending on when this video goes out to you, roughly one year since the M lawsuit has happened, when you're talking with clients, do you want to get asked about it much? >> Not too much anymore. A lot of people seem to have a feeling that they know what happened because they know that it settled and things like that, but a lot of the media coverage that we were seeing during that time, first off, was incorrect. It was false. a lot of the information that was coming out for it and then what the end result ended up being I think was probably more confusing to the consumers that were actively trying to buy and sell after the fact when the new rules came out.

> So what was supposed to happen is this you know the the big argument has been for years was that why is the seller paying for all the real estate commissions or compensation and the reality I never felt that was the case. I always felt like it was just part of the purchase price, meaning the buyer was willing to pay the price they were willing to pay, knowing that how they were going to compensate their agent was being financed into the deal. And in reality, what they were hoping is is that the seller would hire us to help them sell and they would pay us. And a buyer would then also hire us, which now we have uh documents and things. We can't show you a house now without certain documents being filled out, buyer representation agreements and things of those natures. And the buyers were going to then pay us directly. Affordability is the number one biggest problem in real estate right now. We were saying the other day how it is literally the most unaffordable it has ever been to buy real estate. You know, as a 24-y old trying to buy a house, >> but when you talk to buyers about this, >> their first question is always, "Well, I can't afford to pay you." >> Yep. That is the same conversation over and over again. And honestly, kind of no matter the price point that you're in, to be perfectly honest, a lot of people that are starting to level up out of their first home that they bought going into another, you still don't have enough capital or enough cash or potentially they don't want to because they don't want to overlever their cash and then have no money after the fact for potential repairs, moving costs, all of those kinds of things. So, a lot of the time that is a big question that the buyers ask because you already need so much money to get into a house to begin with, >> right? So, someone, let's say in our area, an average price is $600,000. So, let's just say you're putting 10% down. You need $60,000 for that. You're going to need all the normal title and escrow and closing fees, uh, whatever fees the lenders charging you as well. And then they want to have another fee on top of that for compensation. And so what's happening is somewhat the same that you've seen over the last 30 years that I've been involved in the real estate business is they're just writing their offer and putting that in as one of the things saying, "Hey, we'll pay our agent, but it's part of the price." And so again, now it really hasn't changed a lot, but it's just showing people that the way it was happening before and the way it's happening now, semantics are different, but in reality, it's sort of helping the same way where buyers really are paying their agents, sellers are paying theirs, and it's just all sort of being put into the sales prices. And you know, everyone was concerned how appraisals might be affected and things along those lines. We haven't really seen any major appraisal issues. So, that part's being all good. Downward pressure on commissions. This was one of the things that they were saying realtors all make too much money. We're going to address that later about realtors making too much money and what realtors actually do versus what people >> think that we do. But the average commission in certain parts of the country has definitely had more pressure than others. And I do know this when you live in areas where the average price might be 2, three, four, $5 million. Those are areas when I talked to those realtors for the last 20 years, the the rates have been lower than what you see in some other parts of the country. But then I also knew agents that lived in areas where the average home price might be 100 or $200,000 and used to see 7 8% as compensation in those markets. So it's always been um negotiable. And again, you could always for sale by owner. Yep. You could always do a discount company. You could do a full service company. You could, you know, sell it to a cash company. Like there's a million ways that you could still do this. So, that was something there. On the seller side, they just know you're hiring us, charge you a fee. Yeah. >> And they kind of know that the other side's going to just be negotiated, right? >> Yeah. Pretty much. And especially on as the buyer's agent, I work with a lot of these sellers all over the all over our service area, and it's the same conversation every single time. It's like I make the call before I write an offer and I ask the same five questions or the same handful of questions before doing anything. Agents, please call prior to writing. But >> with that compensation always comes up. You always ask, is your seller cooperating? A lot of the time the answer lately since the N lawsuit has settled was it is negotiable. Write it into your contract. So real estate practice in terms of how that eventually ends up hasn't changed too much. It's about how you get to that point and agreeable between both parties in that sense. >> People want to be able to buy and sell homes and it's like it's going to take time for this to adjust even more. But what's funny is when they first started talking about this, the reason what was so everyone was so up in arms was because the market was hot and it was a sellers market and the sellers were selling homes and they were just flying off the market and people thought, well, what am I paying the other person for or why is that buyer agent being compensated? And now a year later, we're starting to see the market be much more towards the buyers. It's definitely shifting that direction. There is more inventory. Homes are sitting longer. Buyers have the ability to negotiate prices more. If it becomes really buyer dominated that you might see buyer side fees become even higher than they were years ago because sellers are like, I got to get my home sold and I got to do what I can to attract people into my home. So, you know, every industry is going to have their good apples and bad apples. I think for the most part where we live in Northern Nevada, all the realtors are playing by the rules. We rarely see someone advertising and marketing a commission that they're compensating they're offering out. >> But at the same time, um, on the seller side of things, they know what's going on and and it's kind of worked out pretty well that way. Absolutely. Would you agree? >> Y.

> So, if you're thinking about moving to Northern Nevada, do me a favor. Click the link in the description below where you can get a copy of our free buyer guide that'll get you all the information you need to get your journey started. what people think realtors actually do versus what we really do. The biggest thing always was, well, I went ahead and I found the house, right? So, I'm a buyer. I looked online. I went to Zillow or Redfin or Realtor.com or any homes.com, any number of a million websites. Yep. >> And they were searching around online and they found a house >> and they think a lot of buyers, especially ones that aren't past clients of ours, they find a house and what what do they say? They call us and they basically say, "Well, okay, I found the house. What do you do?" And there are about 800 steps between identifying the property and getting you to the closing table that need to happen in order for you to be successful in that. >> The way we helped people find homes when I first started in real estate, was way back pre-in, I know I'm dating myself, where literally a book came out every 3 weeks. If you want to list your house, we had to kind of check the schedule and see when the book was going to be involved so we could put you in the book. and nobody had access to the book besides the real estate agents. So part of finding the home was a huge deal 30 years ago. In today's world when we represent buyers, I wouldn't say finding the home is one of the least important things we do. >> But it's lower down on the list of priorities. And honestly, on the list of difficulty, and I don't mean that in any type of bad way. It does still take skill in order to identify the right property, especially when you start getting into unique needs for people. Like sometimes houses are difficult to find for certain wants and needs that people have, but a lot of the time anymore that is a little bit lower down on the list of things because it is way easier to do now. >> I don't know why people think that the buyer side agents are either not doing as much or not working as hard and don't deserve the same compensation as a seller's agent. What would you say to them about that real quick? I had this conversation with you last night and this is sort of what prompted this video to begin with was >> everything that you do as a buyer agent. You potentially are working with these clients for months to potentially even years and there is all of the time and energy spent, all of the research, all of the conversations, getting you to the right lender if that's what's necessary, getting you in the right position. Potentially you have to do trust documents. like we're getting organized for you to have a successful transaction when we do eventually identify a property and get you going on that but we have months and months and months of prep work that needs to be done prior to sitting down to write an offer to then get you to a closing table. So a lot of the time it is timeconuming it's very labor intensive on the buyer side of thing just simply because that's the nature of purchasing a property. So that is the more there's a lot more volume of work on the buy side. There's a lot more skill to be taken and had on the listing side of things. >> So this is something we talk about all the time. Sydney's been in real estate now for almost a couple of years. >> And most new agents, they learn and train on the buying side because it is it's more labor intensive. Um the skill set is is I don't say it's easier to learn, but there's a little less I would say I hear less expertise on the buyer side than on the selling side of things. But at the same time, it is definitely more timeconuming, labor intensive because when you help a buyer and they get that offer accepted, that's just negotiation number one. People forget there's also, you know, you got to go to the inspections, you got to meet the appraiser. What happens if the appraisal doesn't come in? What happens when we get funky inspection reports and problems and we got to deal with that? >> Well, and having a good buyer's agent, honestly, they are worth their weight and gold. promise you when I say this because all of that prep work to then come into whatever market conditions that you are in during that time which could be potentially a dry market and you're the only offer coming in on that property and we can kind of negotiate back and forth just us and the seller or you're potentially getting into multiple offer situations. You're getting into time crunches. We have contingent properties. There's so many complexities before writing a really, really good offer, whatever your circumstances may be, to make it more enticing to the seller that the buyer's agent knows a whole lot more about and can help you make a better decision, a better offer. Maybe this isn't the right house and we need to go to something else. >> So, when we flip to the seller side of things, this is where a little more expertise comes in. And this is where I've been taking Sydney on a lot of these appointments with me where when someone reaches out to us, raises their hand, and says, "I'm ready to sell my home." >> We got to go see their home. We got to see what it was when they bought it. We got to see what they've done to it over the years to fix it up. We want to see, you know, what neighborhood it's in, how big it's in, what conditions it in, what repairs and what things we may want to do to get it ready for sale. And then the biggest thing, of course, is trying to figure out what that sale price is going to be or that listing price. And that's where the skill is. When you're someone newer, it's a little easier when someone put a price tag on it to think, oh, it's a little off, it's a little on. Or when a home sits on the market a little while, >> you can feel like there might be some room in that price. But when you're trying to pick that original number, you know, some neighborhoods that are cookie cutter track homes, every fourth home is pretty much the same. Easier than, for example, we saw a couple of homes last week that are going to be somewhere between, you know, 1.3 and $2 million. One's closer to two, one's closer to 1.3. And those homes were super unique. >> They were super >> lots of different concerns and issues trying to figure out what to do on there. So once we do that part, there's a lot of communication. Then all that information you could buyers get to see all over Zillow and the internet. Guess who provides all that information? >> He does. >> The selling agents do because we have what's called a listing input form that we detail and fill out all the information about the house. Yeah. >> We hire hopefully a professional photographer to take all those amazing photos you see all over the internet. Y >> and realtors are the one that put all that information typically into a multiple listing service. Some areas I know don't have those. >> And then Zillow and all these other places are basically pulling that feed. So when people think that they're looking on Zillow and are they getting information there that we're not providing them? No. They're getting it from Zillow. Now once we do that, all that marketing, all that advertising, that's what we're talking about. It's a different skill set for selling agents than it is for buying agents. But for whatever reason that the the public perceives that a experienced listing agent who's done this for a long time should and and probably should at least a little bit make more money or be paid more for the same services than a buyer's agent. But again, their job is probably a little more time and labor intensive. We have a lot of heavy lifting up front. >> Yes. >> And so sometimes from the day we meet you to the day your home goes for sale might be a month or two or three depending on the condition of the property or just the timing of things. But we always feel like the sooner we can meet you, the sooner we can talk to you. The the process then we're not in a hurry. We can get photos. Like all those things make a whole lot more sense as far as that stuff goes. And the one thing that people don't think about in all of this is when you deal with residential real estate cuz I own a commercial building. My girlfriend owns commercial property. When you own residential real estate and you're helping people buy and sell their primary residence, >> the one thing that you guys out there in in the world don't realize is it is super emotional for you guys. And what I always say is sometimes really amazing good people temporarily lose their minds and go crazy because not everybody deals with the stress of buying and selling real estate, especially if it was involving a death, a divorce, a job transfer, um bigger, smaller, relocating to other areas. There's so many factors involved in all that that miss, I have a degree in psychology and sociology who I joke all the time as realtors, we should get marriage counseling degrees. But those things are a lot of us just putting our hands on clients and giving them a hug sometimes cuz there's tears, there's laughter, there's emotions, you know, it's just a lot going on as far as all that goes. >> Hiring a good agent again is really beneficial in that sense because people do, we claim it. It's like temporary insanity where perfectly rational people every single day outside of all of this have great conversations with. They're super rational. You get them right in the middle of a real estate transaction and they're a completely different person. >> Yeah. What we did, and we saved it to the end, >> was when people think, and I I put in chat GPT, I've Googled this topic all the time, >> what people think realtors really do or what we really are because we have such kind of a negative connotation of what our business is. People think of us as used car salesmen and nothing against used car salesmen. I just I don't like buying cars, but it's thought of negatively as well. And so, what do people sometimes think, especially people that don't know us, when they talk to you on the phone, what do they think we do? Well, especially as a buyer's agent, they think that I'm just a glorified door opener, that they can just call me and that I'll just parade you around until you find a house and then I'm just going to slap a number on a piece of paper and then we go from there. And it's not quite that easy. >> They also think that, you know, that we just throw the status onto the MLS, we randomly pick a number, it goes all over the internet, and we just sit here and we wait for the offers to come in. And then when they do, we're all rich. We all make tons of money and and we're just good sweet talkers and smooth talkers and all that kind of good stuff. And the thing about it is, and this is why you need to interview and hire your realtors, yes, >> it is super important to have good experienced realtors and just know when you talk with us, this is how we've been able to last this long, is we're always going to give you advice and it's all about making sure that we do what's in your best interest. And we've had plenty of people over years, we told them, don't buy a house, don't sell a house, bail out of this transaction because the reports came back, sir. Absolutely. >> And so, no, we don't just sit on the weekends and host open houses. We, you know, flexible hours is my favorite one. >> Oh my god. You know, people think that you just got this wonderful flexible hour schedule. How many days of the week would you say that we work zero? Like not at all. >> It >> never hard. I mean, we would have had to like plan a vacation and we were gone gone somewhere else. But in terms of I sat at home and just chose not to work today. Never. Never. >> And the funny part is is when city mentioned the word vacation. This is part of why I have a team and we have a team. So that when we go on vacation, it's hard for me and Sydney to go on vacation at the same time, but between our assistant Robin, our property manager, Kylie, we have to coordinate so that hopefully at the most one of us is gone. On occasion, you might get two of us gone for a short amount of time because we want to be able to actually help each other. But if you're an individual agent, you go on vacation, you're going to have to find a buddy or someone in your office or unfortunately you end up working while you're on vacation. And again, um it's not this game of just I always call it's not like a matchmaking game. We just put buyers and sellers together. We've always got something that works perfectly and off you go. It just it doesn't work that way. >> I also think a lot of the time people forget when you're in a real estate transactions, the buyers and the sellers are not talking directly to each other. So, who you hire really does matter because how we effectively uh communicate your wants and needs to matters. How I go about saying something matters. How we go about the entirety of the transaction, the whole way through matters because they're not my co-workers. They don't work in the same building as I do. but I have to work with all of the other agents that are in our service area. >> So, I'm gonna give you a quick example of that real quick and then we're going to run for you guys. But, we put a deal together this weekend. >> We have a client who I've helped for years. Her dad passed away, put her house on the market, her his house on the market for sale, probably knew about this house four or five months ago, but we had to wait for some trust things, some some other documents that we needed to So, we couldn't get our house on the market. We need to get it ready. Some estate sales. All kinds of stuff was happening. >> Yeah. But we got an offer on the house and the agent who wrote us an offer did write a full price offer but was asking for a large percentage of money for things like closing cost and rate buy downs all that kind of stuff. >> Yeah. >> Well, my client wanted to, you know, get maybe $3 to $5,000 more in that price. And instead of just countering the price higher, we called that other realtor because again, at some point if you counter the price too high, it won't appraise, right? >> So, I talked to other realtor said, "Hey, my client's thinking about countering it this much. Is it more important that your client needs all that cash?" for the deal or if we just make that a little smaller, leave the price alone, then the net dollars to the seller works out great. And those kind of conversations that most of the public doesn't even know we're having is how you're able to put deals together. So, an offer that came in Saturday morning is by Sunday night agreed upon and done. And when we go into the office on Monday, Robin will get some new information. We'll have an escro to open and we'll have a deal that's moving along that'll close in the next three or four weeks because it's a pretty fast, you know, closing deal like that. Realtors in my world should be thought of the same way as your CPA, your doctor, >> your doctor, your your financial planner, your insurance person. Like, you need to have a real estate agent that can help you because I promise you over the years, we can help you do deals. We can help you make money. And once you're done doing your primary residence stuff and you're ready to buy investment property, we can do that as well. And the one cool thing about us is what? >> We know realtors all over the country. We do. So, for those of you that are watching these videos and you're thinking about moving to Reno or the surrounding areas to Reno and you have a home to sell where you live, yeah, reach out to us. We put referrals together for people all the time. So, that way I know you're working with a good realtor there because the hardest part is if you got a crappy realtor where you are and you have a home to sell and you're moving here and that deal wherever you are falls apart because we're and it screws your deal up here, you're not going to be happy about that. So, we'll see. But full circle, the N lawsuit, I'm sure there'll be more to come on that whole thing. That's part, you know, what we wanted to start with today. But in reality for us and our clients, nothing dramatic. Nothing overly big has changed and and we'll go from there. So, >> so if you're thinking about moving to Northern Nevada, do me a favor. Check out this video we did right here that will show you all the areas, the surrounding areas, and everything you need to know about living and moving to Northern