Commentary The housing market is hot, hot, hot right now, and home prices continue to soar in many markets to their highest prices ever. Since it doesn’t cost a real estate agent ten times as much to sell a million dollar home than a $100,000 home, one would expect that the percentage fees for real estate agents would be falling. They aren’t. Why? I started investigating the fees charged by the real estate industry some 15 years ago when I was an economics writer for the Wall Street Journal. What I discovered is that the real estate agents had created a de facto legal cartel that often rips off buyers and sellers of homes. The excess cost to home buyers and sellers from this industry cartel is typically more than $10,000 for homes with a price above $500,000. A Brookings Institution study found that, “across the country, national average commission …
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