The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is sounding more like a Harvey Weinstein movie with Jeffrey Epstein playing the lead role next to Ghislaine Maxwell. With the once storied NAR burning to the ground and scrambling to prevent nearly $5.4 billion in potentially trebled damages from the recent Sitzer – Burnett litigation — the jury awarded $1.8 billion themselves — there is not a lot of sympathy for the real estate sector today. It is apropo that realtors are finally getting a taste of the world they built and on the other end of the stick once swung against the innocent consumers which they wielded. It is even more troubling when the former NAR president left under a cloud of sexual accusations, the next NAR President only made it a couple of months before being blackmailed with a past personal, non-financial matter and Rome burning down all around.
With demands of kickbacks being paid by consumers to line the pockets of each other, it sounds almost identical to the way that the National Association of Mortgage Field Services (NAMFS) runs their pay-to-play and kickback scheme against Labor — simply ask Christina Chauncey-Deese.
Where the rubber meets the road, though, is the simple and salient fact that Inman is reporting today — 49% of realtors have sold one house or none at all in all of 2023. That is a stark number to understand as when you begin to lose realtors at that level. The reality is that those funds you come to depend on at the NAR to spend on, well, I guess you would say expenses, dry up rapidly.
No one wants to talk about the clear and present danger that not only the NAR and their horrific selection of leadership has posed to the consumer, but also about how their control of the MLS has ensured disenfranchisement for all other than say Zillow or other corporate shills. Realtors, in their current state, are antithetical to capitalism. Nowhere, in the current form of global capitalism is there a requirement to voluntarily pay someone else for doing absolutely nothing. In fact, anywhere else this would potentially be a felony at the levels in which realtors are collecting these kickbacks. If I am selling my home, why in the hell do I need to pay they buyer’s agent? I go far further than the jury did in the Award to the victims. This is, part and parcel, a RICO based conspiracy. And simply because the NAR got away with it, for decades, does not mean that the realtors whom profited from it should not go to prison.
Sounding like NAMFS? Well, it is! You must only use NAMFS insurance, NAMFS background checks, NAMFS software, and then pay a kickback of the percentage of your work back to NAMFS.
Let me explain this in a way that only a trained media professional such as myself is capable of doing,
Realtors and the NAR, in conjunction, have created a monopolistic, predatory environment backed by over 1,000+ Board Members all preying upon the consumer. In addition to the recent jury award and the hundreds of billions of dollars teeing up in all 50 states, referral fees to non realtors are illegal. Or, take for example, the fees on top of fees for the MLS itself added on for every fiefdom there is across the Nation.
The reign of the realtors is nearing its conclusion. And with the onset of both blockchain and AI, the fact of the matter is they serve little purpose anymore.
