This time last year, many homebuyers didn’t try to negotiate their agent’s fee, even if they knew it was an option.
Now, more of them are playing ball with their agents — and coming away feeling like they notched a win.
An Intel analysis of October responses to the Inman-Dig Insights consumer survey reveals that active homeshoppers have steadily increased their appetite for negotiating compensation.
- As part of its survey of 3,000 working U.S. adults earlier this month, Intel found that 40 percent of active buyers said they attempted to negotiate compensation before signing their buyer agency agreement.
- That’s up from 28 percent of active buyers at the same time last year.
But that’s not all. Clients feel that their success rates in negotiations are improving as well.
It’s unclear how large the effect of this negotiation has been on actual commission rates in many markets, if any. In fact, the data raises questions about how successful the new lawsuit-influenced policies have been in their stated goals of empowering consumers to bring down commission rates.
But the new data does illustrate how much the relationship between agents and clients has changed in the wake of the National Association of Realtors settlement rules that went into effect more than a year ago.
And some of Intel’s findings on the seller side, in particular, have implications for how future growth in demand or constraint in supply might impact brokerage revenues.
Diverging effects
In the new rules brought about by lawsuits against the industry in recent years, perhaps no group of people were more empowered than homesellers.
By insisting on offering sellers a new option to decline to cover the buyer-side commission, groups that had sued the industry hoped that the prospect of pocketing 2 percent to 3 percent of the sale price would be too tantalizing for listing clients to pass up.
The idea was that this trend, in turn, would put additional pressure on buyers to seek substantially lower commission rates — and incentivize brokerages and other companies to offer lower-cost alternatives.
Yet homesellers have become less likely to employ this strategy over time, not more, Intel found.
- 69 percent of homesellers who were also on the market to buy in October said they had decided to agree to cover the buyers agent fee up front, up from 46 percent who said the same thing a year earlier.
- The share of actively shopping homesellers who said they planned to withhold covering the buyer-side fee as a starting point in negotiations fell from 39 percent to 21 percent over that time, while the share taking “a firm stance” against covering the buyer’s fee dipped from 11 percent to 8 percent.
As part of the survey, Intel sought additional insight into the role that agent advice was playing in these listing decisions.
- 31 percent of sellers actively shopping for their next home in October said their agent “strongly advised” them to offer to cover the buyer-side fee, up from 26 percent the year before.
- 14 percent of this same group in October said their agent “pushed back” after the client indicated that they did not want to cover the fee, up from 9 percent in October of 2024.
Without a broad base of sellers taking a hardline stance against covering the buyer-side fee, the downward pressure on buyer-side commissions has been relatively weak under the first full year of the new rules.
That finding, based on various public data and reporting from publicly traded brokerage companies like Anywhere, was only reinforced by the consumer survey, which showed no slippage year-over-year in commission rates paid to buyers agents among active homeshoppers. (Most other measures show a small decrease in the average rate since the new rules were announced last year.)
But clients are increasingly likely to engage with their agents on questions of compensation, the survey found. And buyers are more likely today to come away thinking they were successful in bringing down the fee — even if they’re paying roughly what last year’s buyers did as a percentage of the purchase price.
- The share of active homebuyers surveyed in October who knew they could negotiate the fee but chose not to dropped to 23 percent from 40 percent the year before.
- Of the group that did choose to negotiate, 88 percent reported they “successfully brought down the buyer’s agent fee.” Only 66 percent of negotiating buyers reported a successful outcome the year before.
Taken together, these results raise the possibility that some agents are simply anticipating more of their clients will try to negotiate, coming in with a higher proposed rate to the client, and then landing back near the compensation that used to be typical for their market.
It’s a state of affairs that appears stable as long as listings remain on a buyer-friendly trajectory. But against a more seller-leaning standard, where listing clients have more leverage to try things like not covering the buyer’s commission, the nascent policies remain largely untested.
Intel will continue to track these questions in the months and years ahead.
About the Inman-Dig Insights Consumer Survey
The Inman-Dig Insights consumer survey was conducted from Oct. 8-9 to gauge the opinions and behaviors of Americans related to homebuying.
The survey sampled a diverse group of 3,000 American adults, who ranged in age from 24 to 65 and were employed either full-time or part-time. The participants were selected to produce a broadly representative breakdown by gender and region.
Statistical rigor was maintained throughout the study, and the results should be largely representative of attitudes held by U.S. adults with full- or part-time jobs. Both Inman and Dig Insights are majority-owned by Toronto-based Beringer Capital.
