POV: The NAR Settlement Wasn’t Reform. It Was a Surrender.
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Pete Thorpe is a regional leader of Omni Group, a real estate network of Epique Realty. He has over 12 years of experience in real estate, dual-state licensing in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and is the owner of Real Connected, a marketing and technology agency for agents. That combination of hands-on brokerage experience and technology-driven thinking gives him a clear view of where the industry is headed, and how agents can position themselves to thrive as it changes. Pete’s insight and direct take is that the NAR settlement wasn’t reform; it was a surrender. Read on to see why.
The National Association of Realtors had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to clean its own house. Instead, it wrote a $418 million check, rewrote the paperwork, and called it reform.
The Sitzer/Burnett verdict was a message from a jury of ordinary consumers. They believed the industry had been steering, colluding, and obscuring how agents get paid. NAR’s response was not to root out the people actually doing those things. It was to change the forms everyone else has to sign.
A Settlement That Changed the Paperwork—Not the Problem
Think about what the NAR settlement actually accomplished.
Offers of compensation came off the MLS, so now they happen over the phone, by text, and on listing agent websites. That is, in exactly the opaque back channels the lawsuit claimed to eliminate. This is the opposite of what the NAR was trying to accomplish.
Additionally, buyers who used to walk into an open house now get a contract shoved at them at the front door by an agent they met ninety seconds ago. And NAR’s consumer messaging on why has been so thin that most buyers think they’re signing a liability waiver.
Sellers are more confused than ever about what they’re paying, what they can offer, and what a “concession” is versus what it was called last year.
The settlement’s defenders call this transparency. It is transparency the way rearranging a filing cabinet in the dark is organization.
The People Who Caused the Problem Didn’t Pay the Price
And here is the part that should enrage every honest practitioner: not one bad actor lost anything.
The agents who actually steered buyers away from low-commission listings (i.e. the listings that paid less), the ones the plaintiffs’ attorneys built their case on, are still licensed, still practicing, still closing deals under the new forms.
Real estate is one of the only licensed professions that treats discipline as a public relations problem rather than a duty.
Doctors lose licenses. Attorneys get disbarred. Realtors get a settlement negotiated on their behalf and a webinar on the new paperwork.
If NAR had spent twenty years enforcing its own Code of Ethics with actual teeth, revoking membership and referring violators to state licensing boards, there would be no class action. The lawsuit didn’t create the problem. The lawsuit was the invoice for decades of refusing to police itself, and the membership got stuck paying it.
This Wasn’t an Aberration. It’s the NAR Playbook.
None of this should surprise anyone who has watched NAR operate.
This is the organization that spent a reported quarter million dollars on a logo refresh in 2018 so universally despised by its own members that it was shelved within days.
This is the organization that handed away operational control of Realtor.com in the 1990s, watching its own brand name become someone else’s asset while News Corp eventually collected the value.
This is the organization that stood by while Zillow built a consumer empire on data its own members fed it for free, then acted shocked when the portal it ignored became the industry’s front door and, increasingly, its competitor.
Add a leadership scandal in 2023 for good measure.
The NAR settlement isn’t an aberration. It’s the pattern: react late, protect the institution, bill the members, and leave the public more confused than before.
Punish the Guilty. Protect the Honest. Inform the Public.
What should have happened is simple.
Fight the case or settle it, fine, but pair either path with a real enforcement regime: documented steering means expulsion and a licensing board referral, full stop.
Then put actual money behind plain-English consumer education so first-time buyers in America understand what a buyer agreement is before an agent hands them one on a doorstep.
Punish the guilty, protect the honest, inform the public. NAR did none of the three. It protected the guilty, taxed the honest, and confused the public. That’s not a settlement. That’s a surrender with extra steps.
