Commission Collision

Splits and Caps Daily: Action for Agents

September 29, 2025

📈 Market Move:

Batton Down the Hatches

Remember Sitzer/Burnett — the “agents made sellers overpay” case? Well, now buyers want their shot. Enter the Batton lawsuit.

Plaintiffs are pushing for class action status to represent millions of buyers across 23 states + D.C. who they say got ripped off by NAR’s old rules. The claim? A decades-long conspiracy that inflated buyer-broker commissions.

An expert crunched the numbers: in the U.S., buyer agents typically got ~3%. Abroad? ~1.38%. That gap adds up to an average of $8.5K in overcharges per buyer. Just four MLSs tested = $3.6B in damages. Scale that nationwide and we’re talking tens of billions.

Even if the court cuts out buyers who also sold homes (since those sales were already covered in past settlements), the class size is still massive.

At the heart of this is NAR’s now-killed “Participation Rule,” which basically locked in rigid commission rates and may have encouraged steering buyers toward higher-paying listings.

NAR’s official stance: “Nothing to see here, we foster competition.” But if the court greenlights this as a class action, it’s another monster lawsuit with billion-dollar stakes — and it’s buyers, not sellers, holding the pitchforks this time.

🌟Quote of the Day:

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

⚡ Quick Win:

Micro-Learning Sprint: Watch a 5-minute YouTube or TikTok on a new real estate tip, tech hack, or negotiation tactic. One insight per day compounds fast.

🎉 Fun Fact of the Day: 

Heads or Tails: 🐘 Some Victorian mansions had rooms just for taxidermy displays — like a museum, but with dead giraffes in your foyer.

📚 Book Recommendation:

“The Art of Profitability” by Adrian Slywotzky — This isn’t your average “rah rah business” book. It’s basically 23 cheat codes for how companies actually make money — told through conversations between a mentor and student. No fluff, just frameworks.

Here’s the kicker: most businesses think “profit = revenue minus costs.” Wrong. Slywotzky shows there are dozens of profit models — from “customer solution profit” to “installed base profit” — and if you pick the right one for your business, you win. If you pick the wrong one, you’re toast.

It reads less like a textbook and more like eavesdropping on a billionaire explaining how the game really works. If you’re in real estate, it’ll flip how you think about commissions, splits, even how you structure deals.

Bottom line: if you don’t understand profit models, you’re playing Monopoly while everyone else is playing chess.

Celebrate the progress, then chase the next.

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