In this first week of the Sitzer Burnett trial is all about the plaintiff presenting their case. And it seems that the plaintiffs are all about showing training materials, and slides from previous conferences that use the 6% as proof that the “fix is in”!
The poor consumer has been tricked in to thinking that this percentage was never negotiable. Hell, the whole reason for scripts in the first place was that CONSUMERS WERE ALWAYS TRYING TO NEGOTIATE. Has anyone brought that point up?
Also, this….
Yeah, the focus on training seems funny. A sales organization is training its sales people to overcome objections? That’s shocking!! And can you believe that the training from those organizations is similar? Conspiracy! Give me a break.
Yep. The plaintiff opening must have been quite the little cry-fest. 🙄
You make a good point that buyers do have an option–they can choose a brokerage that gives a refund, like Redfin, or they can negotiate on their own. I did each of these on property purchases. I used Redfin and got their rebate check. The next time I had an attorney interact directly with the seller agent to explain that we wanted 100% of the buyer commission–the attorney took care of the negotiating and legal and I paid his cost. The most recent time, I told a buyer’s agent a fixed fee that I would pay them and anything beyond that was to be refunded to me. There are a lot of ways for a buyer to pay a fee that they regard as appropriate, regardless of any MLS mandated fees to go to the buying side. It is a buyer’s choice what they want to do, depending on how much they need the buyer’s agent.
By the way, this is no different than what a client can do when hiring an attorney. If the court really wants to do something useful, they should go after the attorneys trying to make a killing here and wasting enormous resources dealing with them.