If buyers are forced to pay their own broker's commission, and in the articles they're saying there's still like some gray area about what's going to happen. But that is what should happen. Buyers should be responsible for paying their own brokers. And if you do that, I think you'll knock out half the fees of this industry.View on YouTube
The prediction is a conditional one: if U.S. home buyers are actually made to pay their own buyer’s-agent commissions out of pocket (rather than those fees being embedded on the seller’s side), then the total commission pool would fall by ~50%.
As of late 2025, that conditional world doesn’t really exist yet:
- After the March 2024 NAR settlement and the August 2024 rule changes, buyers must sign written agreements specifying how their agent will be paid, but the commission can still be funded by either the buyer or the seller (or via seller concessions). In practice, the traditional pattern of sellers covering much or all of the buyer’s agent commission remains common.(washingtonpost.com)
- Reports note that many agents and sellers effectively preserve the old structure by arranging off‑MLS commission splits or seller concessions, despite formal language that buyers are “responsible” for their agent’s pay.(investopedia.com) Direct, out‑of‑pocket payment by buyers is still relatively rare and uneven across markets.(washingtonpost.com)
Because the premise (“buyers are forced to pay their own broker’s commission” in a clear, universal, out‑of‑pocket way) has not been fully met, we can’t say whether the consequent (a ~50% drop in the total commission pool) is right or wrong.
What we can observe is that, under the current mixed/transition regime, total commissions have certainly not fallen by anything close to 50%:
- A 2025 survey by Clever Real Estate finds the average combined commission rose from about 5.32% to 5.44%, roughly back to 2023 levels, not half of them.(etxview.com)
- Redfin’s national data show buyer‑agent commissions around 2.4–2.55% before and after the settlement, with only small moves in either direction, and aggregate commission levels roughly unchanged through Q1–Q2 2025.(redfin.com)
However, since the prediction explicitly hinges on a stronger, cleaner version of buyer‑paid commissions than what we actually have now, the fair assessment is that it hasn’t really been tested yet, rather than proven correct or incorrect. Hence: inconclusive rather than wrong.