What the NAR Settlement Actually Did to Real Estate Commissions — and Why Orlando Sellers Are Paying the Price
Chris Creegan of Creegan Group, Featured in the Orlando Business Journal, Updates His Analysis on How the Commission Landscape Has Really Changed
Chris Creegan | Creegan Group | Maitland, FL | 2025 Broker of the Year | Top 40 Nationwide
Recently, the Orlando Business Journal — one of the most respected business publications in Central Florida and a trusted source for the region’s executives, investors, and professionals — featured Creegan Group’s Chris Creegan in a piece examining the real-world impact of the National Association of Realtors settlement on real estate commissions in the Orlando market: https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2024/09/13/chris-creegan-real-estate-nar-settlement.html.
The Orlando Business Journal piece explored how the landmark NAR settlement, which took effect in August 2024, was reshaping the way agents and consumers interact around the question of who pays what in a real estate transaction. The article presented the initial analysis — what the settlement was designed to do, how the industry was adapting, and what it meant for buyers and sellers across Central Florida.
Since that Orlando Business Journal feature (https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2024/09/13/chris-creegan-real-estate-nar-settlement.html) was published, the market has had time to reveal what the settlement has actually produced. And the honest assessment — the one that every seller in Central Florida deserves to hear before they sign a listing agreement — is that the outcome has been meaningfully different from what the settlement’s architects intended.
This is that update.
What the NAR Settlement Was Supposed to Do
A quick recap for context. The NAR settlement — reached in March 2024 and implemented August 17, 2024 — was the result of class-action litigation brought by home sellers who argued that the traditional commission structure, which automatically bundled buyer agent compensation into the seller’s cost, was anticompetitive and artificially inflated costs.
The core changes the settlement imposed:
Commissions can no longer be advertised on the MLS. Prior to the settlement, a seller’s listing on the Multiple Listing Service would display an offer of buyer agent compensation — typically 2.5 to 3 percent — visible to every agent and buyer in the system. That transparency is now gone. Sellers and listing agents negotiate compensation separately, and it cannot appear in the MLS itself.
Buyers must sign written buyer broker agreements before touring. These agreements specify what the buyer has committed to pay their agent — creating explicit, documented compensation expectations at the beginning of the buyer-agent relationship rather than letting those arrangements remain informal or undefined.
The theory was that this would increase transparency and drive commissions down — that buyers would negotiate directly with their agents, sellers would gain more control over what their money paid for, and the market would self-regulate toward more rational commission structures.
Here is what actually happened instead.
What the Settlement Actually Produced — The Real Picture From the Field
I have now operated through more than a year of transactions under the new settlement rules. I have seen the full range of how agents, sellers, and buyers are navigating the changed landscape. And the pattern that has emerged is one that should concern every homeowner in Central Florida who is considering listing their home.
Commissions Have Become Less Transparent, Not More
The settlement’s stated goal was increased transparency. The opposite has occurred.
When buyer agent compensation was visible in the MLS, every party in the transaction — the seller, the listing agent, the buyer agent, and the buyer — could see exactly what was being offered. Sellers could make informed decisions about whether the offered compensation was competitive enough to attract buyer agents and the buyers they represent. Buyers could plan accordingly. Agents could advise their clients accurately.
Now that buyer compensation is off the MLS, the transaction has become a series of private negotiations that most sellers are not equipped to navigate — because most sellers do not transact in real estate regularly and are entirely dependent on their listing agent for guidance. That guidance, as we are seeing across the market, is not always in the seller’s best interest.
Listing Agent Greed Is Emerging as the Dominant Pattern
Here is what I am watching happen with increasing frequency across the Central Florida market, and what every seller needs to understand before they sign a listing agreement.
Under the old structure, commissions were transparent and displayed directly in many Multiple Listing Service (MLS) systems.
Under the new structure, listing agents negotiate their own compensation directly with the seller or seller’s agent — and many are taking significantly more on the listing side while offering significantly less to the buyer’s agent. I am seeing listing agents charge sellers 4 and 5 percent on the listing side and then offering buyer agents 1 or 2 percent — or nothing — from the seller’s proceeds.
The agents doing this are not doing it because it produces better outcomes for their sellers. They are doing it because the opacity of the new system allows it. When compensation is off the MLS and sellers lack the professional context to evaluate what they are agreeing to, the structure invites this kind of extraction.
The Math That Sellers Are Not Being Shown
Here is the mechanism that every seller in the Orlando market needs to understand.
When a buyer signs a buyer broker agreement — which is now required before they can tour a home — they commit to a specific compensation for their agent. In this market, buyer agents are often agreeing to compensation in the range of 2.5 to 3 percent.
When that buyer arrives at a home where the listing agent is only offering 1 or 2 percent to the buyer’s side, the buyer faces a gap between what they committed to pay their agent and what the seller is offering. That gap has to be resolved somehow. And it gets resolved one of two ways:
The buyer reduces their offer. If a buyer agreed to pay their agent 3 percent and the listing is only offering 1 percent, the buyer reduces their offer by the 2 percent gap — because that 2 percent has to come from somewhere, and if the seller is not providing it, the buyer will price it into what they are willing to pay. On an $800,000 home, that is a $16,000 reduction in the offer. On a $1,500,000 home, it is $30,000.
The buyer’s agent skips the showing. If the compensation being offered is genuinely insufficient to meet the buyer agent’s agreement with their client, the buyer agent may simply not show the property (at their buyer’s request) — because taking their client to a showing they cannot afford to participate in creates its own set of problems. This is happening. Homes with inadequate buyer agent compensation are seeing fewer showings from active, serious buyers.
In either scenario, the only party who gains is the listing agent who took the extra percentage points. The only party who suffers is the seller — who receives a lower offer, or who loses showings entirely from buyers who would otherwise have been qualified candidates.
A Real Transaction That Illustrates the Problem
I will not name the parties involved. But I will tell you what happened on a recent transaction in the Orlando market that illustrates exactly how this plays out in practice.
The home was priced in the $800,000 range. It is an attractive property in a desirable community. The listing agent negotiated a 5 percent commission on the listing side from the seller — leaving very little offered to the buyer’s agent side of the transaction. The seller, by all accounts, did not fully understand what they had agreed to. They saw a number and signed. They did not understand how that number was being divided, what it meant for the buyer agent compensation being offered, or how it would affect the pool of buyers who would engage with their home.
The transaction closed. The listing agent collected an exceptionally large check. And the seller — who may have walked away thinking they had a successful sale — left a significant amount of money on the table because of a commission structure that was engineered to benefit one person in that transaction, and it was not the seller. They only then realized that they had paid out a total of 8% — higher than anything I’ve seen before — after their home sat stale on the market due to agent greed.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is happening in the Central Florida market right now, and it will continue happening as long as sellers do not understand the new landscape well enough to ask the right questions before they sign.
The Fundamental Truth That the Settlement Did Not Change
For all the disruption the NAR settlement has created, one thing remains absolutely true — and understanding it is the key to understanding everything else.
The money in a real estate transaction always comes from the transaction. There is no world in which a buyer is truly, independently paying for their real estate agent out of their own separate funds. In virtually every residential real estate transaction, the buyer is accounting for their agent’s compensation — consciously or not — in the offer they write.
Think about it this way. If a buyer signs a buyer broker agreement committing 3 percent to their agent, and the seller is offering nothing to the buyer’s side, the buyer has two options: pay their agent 3 percent out of their own pocket in addition to the purchase price, or reduce the purchase price by the amount needed to net the same position.
Almost no buyer has the liquidity to pay a buyer agent fee on top of a down payment, closing costs, moving costs, and reserves. So the fee becomes embedded in the offer. The “buyer paying their own agent” narrative, while technically compliant with the settlement’s structure, describes a reality that almost never plays out the way the language implies. The money comes from the transaction. It always has. The settlement changed the paperwork. It did not change the economics.
What the settlement did change is who controls how that money moves — and the answer, increasingly, is the listing agent. Which means that the character, ethics, and alignment of interests of your listing agent has never mattered more than it does right now.
What the Right Commission Structure Actually Looks Like
At Creegan Group, we approach commissions with one priority: what produces the best outcome for the seller. That is not always what produces the largest check for the listing agent. Sometimes those interests are in conflict. And when they are, a seller-first brokerage resolves that conflict in favor of the seller every single time.
The right approach to commission structure in the post-settlement environment:
Transparent conversation about total compensation at the listing consultation. Every seller we represent understands exactly what total compensation is being offered, how it is divided, what the buyer agent side looks like, and why the division we are recommending will maximize their outcome rather than our check. This is a non-negotiable part of how we operate.
Competitive buyer agent compensation that attracts the full buyer pool. Underoffering buyer agent compensation narrows the field of buyers who will engage with a home. In a market with rising inventory — Central Florida currently sits at approximately 4.2 months of supply — narrowing the buyer pool is not a strategy. It is a liability. We recommend buyer agent compensation that keeps every qualified buyer in the market engaged with our seller’s property.
The understanding that a larger check for the listing agent is worth nothing if it costs the seller a better offer. The math is simple. A listing agent who keeps an extra 2 percent on an $800,000 home collects an additional $16,000. If that same structure causes the buyer to reduce their offer by $16,000 — or causes a buyer agent to skip the showing — the net outcome for the seller is zero gain at best, and a material loss at worst.
The listing agent who structures compensation to maximize their own take at the seller’s expense is not serving their fiduciary duty. They are violating it.
What Sellers Should Ask Before Signing a Listing Agreement in 2026
The NAR settlement has made pre-signing conversations more important than ever. Before any Orlando homeowner signs a listing agreement, these are the questions they should be asking — and expecting clear, specific answers to:
What is your total commission, and how is it divided? Not the total number. The specific breakdown between the listing side and the buyer agent side. If a listing agent is reluctant to answer this clearly, that reluctance is itself an answer.
What are you recommending for buyer agent compensation, and why? The recommendation should be accompanied by a market-based rationale — not a number designed to leave more on the listing side. If the number being offered to buyer agents is materially below market, ask why.
How do you handle situations where a buyer’s broker agreement specifies more than you are offering? This is the gap scenario. A transparent listing agent will walk you through exactly how this situation resolves and what it means for the offers you receive.
What is your track record on net proceeds to sellers? Not just sale price. Net proceeds — what the seller actually walks away with after all commissions and costs. An agent who is genuinely focused on seller outcomes can demonstrate this. An agent focused primarily on their own compensation typically cannot.
The Creegan Group Standard — Then, Now, and Going Forward
When the Orlando Business Journal covered the NAR settlement and sought perspective from Central Florida’s most active and respected brokerages, Creegan Group was the natural source for that analysis. Not because we have a practiced public relations message about it. Because we have operated at the highest volume and the highest level of this market long enough to see what actually happens in transactions — and we are willing to say, publicly and clearly, what we see.
What we see right now is a commission landscape that is creating real harm for sellers who lack the information and context to protect themselves. And our response to that is the same response we bring to every aspect of how we represent clients: transparency, honesty, and an absolute priority on the seller’s outcome over our own.
If you are a homeowner in Winter Park, Maitland, Baldwin Park, Orlando, Windermere, Winter Garden, Bella Collina, Lake Mary, or anywhere in Central Florida who is considering listing your home — we will have this conversation with you in full before you sign anything. You will understand exactly what you are agreeing to, exactly what it means for the buyers who will engage with your home, and exactly how the commission structure we recommend will maximize what you walk away with at closing.
That is the standard the Orlando Business Journal recognized when they chose to feature Creegan Group in their coverage of this issue. It is the standard we hold ourselves to every day.
Talk to Creegan Group Before You Sign
A listing agreement is a contract. A commission structure is a financial decision. Both deserve the same scrutiny you would apply to any significant financial transaction — and both deserve an honest conversation with an agent whose interests are genuinely aligned with yours.
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