BYOB this St. Patrick's Day to avoid bloated real estate commissions

Following feature stories about falling real estate commissions in CNNMoney and AOL, hope St. Patrick's Day 2006 is remembered as the year home buyers and sellers began to BYOB -- Bring Your Own Brokers -- and compensate them separately.  Ten mega-trends suggest that the obsolete, two-sided real estate commission may be "uncoupled" or "decoupled" in 2006, fifteen years after the Consumer Federation of America first called for that reform.  The blog post and 90 second video below explain why. 

Why pay a flat-fee listing entry service approximately $500 to list your home in the MLS, and then undermine your potential savings by offering a "traditional" full commissions to buyer agents?  If anyone is interested in experimenting with our money-saving BYOB plan, please email us and we'll bring the booze.  Watch for more details about our newest menu item:  wine tastings at "for sale by owner" open houses.  As always, your comments are welcome below or recorded on our reader line for a future podcast:  617-661-4046.

Update on Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 5:12PM by RealEstateCafe

Hard to believe we wrote this blog post five years ago, and harder still to believe their has been so little progress towards uncoupling or divorcing real estate commissions.  With one in four households upside down on their mortgages, can home sellers -- whether they are using a listing agent or selling on their own -- afford to pay a traditional cobroke?  Nonsense!  Why pay a 2.5-3% cobroke when you're going broke?  If the cobroke fee is effectively an industry imposed real estate transfer tax, why hasn't there been a tax payer revolt or intervention by regulators who should be protecting consumers from unnecessary expenses?  Are residential real estate reforms outside the scope of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency?  Five years ago, one industry observer wrote:

The real estate industry now operates multiple listing services that not only draw attacks for suppressing competition, but also have at their core a service that is obsolete and inefficient: the communication of interbroker compensation offers.

Click on these links for more detail:

http://bit.ly/EndMLS1

http://bit.ly/10MegaTrends (includes slideshow)

http://bit.ly/DivorceCommissions (wiki action plan you can coauthor)