 What's up everybody? So according to the Wall Street Journal, right now, as I speak, us real estate agents are gearing up for a fight to save our commissions. Do what? When I read this headline, I literally busted out laughing like really out loud and I thought to myself, this is clickbait. This is the biggest definition of clickbait I've ever seen. But no, the more I started reading this article, the more I realized it's a real article written by a real publisher, but doesn't have any merit. Okay. I want to give you my thoughts and I want to hear your thoughts in the comments. So let's dive right in here. The residential real estate industry is bracing for a challenge to the commission's charge by its sales agents. Okay. One that could put downward pressure on the fees paid by home buyers and sellers. Okay. This is just mind blowing stuff here. The justice department is investigating home sale commissions. Do what? The justice department is investigating home sale commissions. Um, and in a wide ranging executive order by president Biden, he asked the federal trade commission to adopt rules to address unfair, uh, practices in the real estate industry. This is insane. Several civil lawsuits, challenging industry rules and practices around commissions have survived all kinds of challenges and drawn support from the justice department, um, putting added pressure on traditional broker fees. All right. The real estate industry has survived past challenges to its commission structure, but consumer advocates say rising home prices have made concerns even greater. So this is amazing stuff here guys. Like the government is stepping in and trying to crack down on real estate commissions and really from what I understand in this article, it's kind of stemming from the fact that home prices went up so much and with the being, the real estate commissions are paid as a percentage. So naturally as home prices rise, commissions also rise, um, and people are complaining about this, how much realtors are making, um, based on, you know, the higher the prices, the higher commissions, um, the litigation and the government attention to, uh, the industry is getting right now is unprecedented. Okay. Um, so what they're saying is, is there's more civil lawsuits and there's more complaints to the government about how high real estate commissions are than ever before. Um, this is mind blowing. So let me give you my thoughts right off the bat about this and that is this real estate commissions are already regulated by the market. Okay. They're completely negotiable. There's no need for any further regulation on something that's already regulated by the market buyers and sellers. Yes. I said buyers as well can, um, negotiate their commissions and for all of you who think a buyer can't negotiate the commission because they don't know what the commission is or the seller sets the commission. That's just not true. I've had several buyers over my career negotiate the commission that I was going to make on the deal representing them. And that was another challenge that this article brought up was the buyers, how the buyers really don't have any say so and, you know, their, their commission is, is, you know, added to the purchase price and things of that nature. Listen guys, I mean, on top of everything else, real estate commissions are negotiable. Number one, there's plenty of discount brokers out there. You can even go for sell by owner. Um, there's an even traditional brokers. There's a lot of them taking less. And that's that NAR even proves that the average commission rate is down. Okay. From past years. So as the prices have increased, the commission has naturally went down. Okay. Maybe it hasn't went down far enough for her people that want to complain about how much real estate agents are making. All right. But I just find all of this super interesting that anybody's going to step in to this situation and seeing how it's already negotiable. And here it is right here. The national social renters states in the same article that the average commission nationally is 4.9 compared to 5.4 in the past. So it's come down to half a percent already. Now, honestly, I believe that nothing is going to come of this. Okay. And I'm going to link the article below for the Wall Street Journal so you guys can read all the details yourself. I read every word of the article, but let's just say hypothetically, okay. This is a question. Let's just say hypothetically that something did happen and the government did mandate our commissions and, you know, set, you know, some kind of rules in place where, you know, we make less commissions somehow, um, something that I just don't believe should even be talked about. This conversation shouldn't even be, um, going on right this second. But let's just say something like that did happen. Does that mean that when the market crashes and prices plummet that they're going to raise the commissions because now prices are cheaper? Right. That's the question right there. We're going to regulate because it's high and then keep the regulations when it goes low. Are we going to adjust with the market and make sure real estate agents make the same amount of money regardless of where the market is? It's just absolutely ridiculous. So that's my thoughts. I would love to hear your opinions in the comments. And I want to let you know really quickly about the zero to diamond tour coming to Connecticut. This is going to be the largest event of the zero to diamond tour so far in the last one of 2021. This is going to be massive and we're going to have multi speakers. It's going to be an all day event. It's going to be at the Fox Woods Casino and tickets are free. I'm going to put a link in the description or go to zero to diamond.com backslash events. And if you want to start out 2022 on fire, this is going to be the event you want to go to. I'm Ricky Caruth and those are my thoughts. Get out there and have an incredible day and go help somebody. Let's go.