The real estate commission rate is between 1 - 1.5% in the UK compared to 5.5 - 6 in the US.
Most real estate deals don’t have buyers’ agents. the buyer just goes and works directly with the sellers agent.
If Americans followed UK’s model we would save about 75 billion dollars in commissions.
OP
Respectfully, you may want to do a bit more research, some (in UK) also go as high as 3.5% or more.
Many reference points avail,
Commissions are not “5.5 - 6” in the US. There’s no standard.
Do you have anything of value to share? I don’t understand why mods allow these posts
Edit: Holy Jesus on a penis, I just looked through your post history. You might be one of the most miserable individuals in Bellingham. Did a Realtor burn your house down? Steal your first born? What is your problem brother? Calm down!
Oh this “commissions were always negotiable” canard. The only post without any value is this widely perpetuated and already demonstrably false claim that realtor commissions were always negotiable.
The UK has different consumer protection laws and different rules around property ownership too. They also, for that matter, have a few thousand years of history there we don’t have on how they got there
Commissions are lower AND it costs money to list a property. The net cost to consumers isn’t much different.
I’d be thrilled if we could start charging consumers upfront for services regardless of whether they bought or sold a property.
@HarryJames - FSBO has never been nor will ever be illegal in the USA. If you want to leave money on the table nobody is stopping you.
Just FSBO and get on with it.
“Pennywise and dollar poor” rings true here
You missed the point entirely.
The original post was never meant to show that realtors are useless and that sellers should just go list FSBO.
Instead, it’s citing to the industry average fees in another country to show that fees or commissions in the US were kept artificially high due to a lack of competition.
Most ppl don’t want to ban realtors completely, we consumers just want fair price competition and to get rid of anticompetitive and antitrust practices.
The fact that you jump straight to a strawman argument shows how defensive you are towards any critique and criticism.