The housing market has gotten so unaffordable and difficult to navigate, you’d be forgiven for thinking there was some kind of conspiracy. A Missouri jury just decided there actually was.
Around 2pm ET in a federal courtroom, a jury found the National Association of Realtors, and the largest national real-estate broker franchisors, including Berkshire Hathaway’s HomeServices, had conspired to artificially inflate the home-sale commissions paid to real estate agents. The jury ordered NAR and others to pay nearly $1.8 billion in damages to a class of more than 250,000 home sellers. Under antitrust law, that figure can be tripled to over $5 billion, at the court’s discretion.
