Two years ago, a landmark lawsuit promised to change everything for homebuyers. More transparency. Lower costs. Better outcomes.
The data is in. Buyers are not better off.
Hereâs the news that dropped this week.
đ´ What Buyers Need To Know This Week
Commissions went up after the lawsuit that was supposed to lower them.
The NAR settlement took effect in August 2024. The promise: by requiring written agreements and moving compensation off the MLS, buyers would have more negotiating power and lower costs. The reality: buyer agent commission rates averaged 2.43% in 2025 â slightly higher than pre-settlement norms. Sellers continue to cover buyer agent fees in most transactions.
What this means for buyers: The settlement was designed to create transparency. What it created was paperwork. A buyer who signs a representation agreement after a five-minute explanation has not been protected by the new rules. Theyâve been documented. Two years in, brokers across markets are still learning how to explain these agreements â and buyers are signing contracts they don't fully understand with agents who are still learning how to explain them.
đ Red Flag: If someone told you the lawsuit lowered agent costs, check your agreement. The number may surprise you.
AI is making it harder â not easier â to know if your agent is any good.
82% of real estate agents now report using AI. The industry is treating that as progress. It isnât â at least not automatically. New reporting reveals a stark divide between agents using AI to go deeper on client service and agents using it to go faster on marketing content. The outputs look identical from the outside. The experience, and the outcome for buyers, is entirely different.
A 32-page industry analysis confirmed that human agents only clearly outperform AI in three areas: skilled negotiation, hyperlocal knowledge, and high-stakes emotional support during a transaction. Those are exactly the capabilities buyers are paying for. They are also exactly the capabilities that âI use AI in my practiceâ tells you nothing about.
What this means for buyers: AI adoption has become a marketing signal with no evaluative meaning. An agent who uses AI to generate your offer summary is not the same as an agent who uses AI to analyze comparable sales before negotiating your price. Buyers have no reliable way to tell the difference â unless they know what questions to ask before they hire.
âď¸ Fair Deal: AI tools in the right hands make good agents better. In the wrong hands, they make average agents look sophisticated. The tool isnât the tell. What the agent does with it is.
NAR just voted against giving buyers a way to see through it.
You might have missed this story: this month, NAR had the opportunity to require agents to disclose their own competency gaps to clients. A proposed rule â Standard of Practice 1-17 â would have done exactly that. NAR voted to send it back to committee. Itâs dead for now.
Think about what that means. At the exact moment AI is making it harder to evaluate agent quality, the industryâs own governing body chose not to give buyers a disclosure mechanism. Buyers are navigating a more confusing landscape with fewer tools than they had a month ago.
What this means for buyers: NAR is not your consumer protection agency. It is a trade association. Its membersâ interests and your interests are not the same thing. The transparency you need when hiring an agent is not coming from the industry â buyers are on their own to vet agent competency.
đŻ Bottom Line: The lawsuit changed the paperwork. AI changed the marketing. NAR is changing nothing. The underlying problem â buyers donât have a reliable way to evaluate who theyâre hiring â remains exactly where it was two years ago.
đĄ Worth Watching By Buyers
Congress passed the most significant housing legislation in 36 years this week â a bill designed to increase supply and ease affordability pressure. It's currently unsigned and stalled at the White House over unrelated demands. This bill will ultimately impact housing supply.
Mortgage payments rose 2.2% in May as rates and loan sizes both increased â affordability pressure is compressing buyer timelines and pushing people toward faster decisions with less agent vetting
May new-home sales fell 7.3%, with the bigger story being the shrinking share of affordable new construction â this is another housing supply story to watch
Zillowâs new personalized homebuying hub recommends agents via paid placement, not merit â âpersonalizedâ means personalized to Zillowâs revenue model, not your situation
đ˘ The Real Signal This Week For Buyers
Three things converged this week that point to the same underlying problem.
The lawsuit that was supposed to lower costs didnât. AI created a new layer of confusion about who is actually competent. And the industry voted to keep buyers in the dark rather than require agents to be transparent about what they donât know.
This is the predictable outcome of a system that was never designed around buyer outcomes in the first place.
What to do: Before you evaluate a single neighborhood, evaluate who will represent you in it. That decision shapes everything else â your offer, the negotiation, the inspection, and the years after closing. And that decision is yours to make. No one in the industry is coming to your rescue.
đ From the Hire:Forward⢠Desk
Two years of data just confirmed what this platform was built around.
The problem was never that buyers lacked access to agents. It was that buyers had no framework for knowing whether the agent in front of them was actually the right person to protect their interests. The settlement added a document to that process. It did not add discernment.
The Downstream Effect⢠is exactly this: the consequences of a poor agent hire donât show up at signing. They show up at the offer table, the inspection, the appraisal or sometimes years after closing. Every signal this week is an upstream decision point dressed up as a downstream problem.
The buyers who will fare best are not the most informed buyers. They are the buyers who chose well at the beginning â before the agreement, before the tour, before the offer.
Who represents you matters.
Most homebuyers spend months researching neighborhoods, schools, and mortgage rates. They spend 20 minutes choosing their agent.
That imbalance has consequences.
Learn how to find, vet, and choose the exact right agent for your unique situation.
Start with our Strategic Buyer Agent Interview Blueprint â HireForwardBlueprint.com