They literally get paid to destroy communities for commissions
Someone needs to say it: Realtors are parasites who inflate real estate bubbles.
I should know — I used to be a realtor.
I went to a self-paced high school, which means most of my friends took five years to graduate from the four-year program. But those of us with motivation took a different tact — we handed in all our assignments for the semester within the first few weeks, then took the rest of the year off.
I skipped 56 out of 72 days in my final semester, moved to another city, and went to real estate school.
I literally graduated from college before high school.
The first thing our professor told us was a joke:
“Mortage comes from two Latin root words — mort meaning death and gage meaning grip.”
That’s pretty much all I remember learning, with one exception:
“What is the point of a real estate agent?”
We debated this question endlessly, but the “correct” answer — IE the one that would be on our final exam — was:
To achieve the highest and best use of the land.
HBU is supposedly based on what’s legally permissible, physically possible, financially feasible, and maximally productive.
But realtors know the truth: The actual “highest and best use” is whatever sells the property for the most money and pays the fattest commission.
Which is better?
- A neighborhood devoured by absentee Airbnb hosts, or a neighborhood full of local working families?
- A neighborhood devoured by parasite land-lorders like Jeff Bezos’s new startup for rent-trapping workers, or a neighborhood of young people retaining their hard-earned wealth?
- Yet another overpriced parking lot or a Walmart supercenter, or a regenerative farm producing fresh, local, organic food?
See, none of this matters to the vast majority of real estate agents.
The ONLY thing that matters is “who will pay the most for this property?”
(It’s the only thing that matters to most sellers as well.)
Another dirty secret about the realtor game?
Real estate agents don’t actually work that hard.
- Literally anyone can get their real estate license in a few months of part-time study.
- Pretty much the only thing a realtor has to do is fill in a house info sheet, get the sellers to sign a few documents, snap some photos of the house, then host an open house for like two hours and field phone calls and emails from buyers and other realtors.
- Their (illegal and immoral) competitive advantage comes from the fact that realtors have a monopoly on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). If MLS was open-source, 90% of realtors would be jobless overnight.
- When the deal actually closes, it isn’t even the realtor who does the deal — everything goes off to high-price real estate lawyers who actually know what they’re doing.
I became a realtor at eighteen, and in my first year I made the 2022 equivalent of $70,705 and I worked a legitimate maximum of 350 hours.
The really crazy part?
I sold seven houses at pre-bubble prices. If I sold those same seven houses in Canada at today’s average house price, my commissions would’ve topped $175,000 and I would’ve done far less work because the Great Canadian Real Estate Pyramid Scheme has turned the whole nation into a seller’s market.
Adam Smith said that capitalism is all about incentives.
- When banksters are incentivized with interest, they will absolutely plunge the world into a $300+ trillion global debt crisis.
- When land-lorders are incentivized with rent and capital gains, they will happily rent-trap tenant serfs and enslave humanity.
- When passive investors are incentivized with shareholder profit, they will rapidly assemble monopolies in order to extract from suppliers, employees, customers, the planet, and democracy.
What do you think could possibly happen if real estate agents are incentivized with a commission-based payment structure?
They will do everything in their power to maximize house prices.
Can you see how dangerous realtors are?
Shelter is a human necessity, a human right, and a moral societal imperative.
And yet here we have a class of parasites who barely work, contribute nothing to society, and get paid a mint thanks to a monopoly. When they do work, they simply push up house prices with all sorts of shady tactics like shill bidding, overpricing CMAs, non-transparent/blind auctions, etc.
We should all be working together to drive down the cost of housing until everyone on earth can afford protection from the elements.
The other dangerous thing about incentivizing real estate agents to drive up house prices? They don’t give a rip about local communities and will happily sell to outside Airbnb vultures, grasping land-lorders, and trillion-dollar hedge funds.
Real estate agents literally destroy communities for commissions.
Luckily, there are some extremely simple ways to force realtors to work for society instead of against it:
1. Kill the monopoly
The first and easiest thing to do is to make MLS a public carrier instead of a private monopoly. It’s really that simple — anyone should be able to go on MLS, put in their house details, and have their listing appear on MLS. Sellers could then field their own emails and phone calls and house tours, and real estate lawyers would close the contracts like they currently do.
This would save buyers and sellers an average of 5–6% on every single house transaction, which works out to over $50,000 for the average house in Canada and $25,000 for every house in America. It would also drive down real estate agent commissions, which would drive most realtors out of the game.
2. Kill the commission
The other thing we absolutely need to do is get rid of commissions.
If a realtor gets paid 2.5% on the sell side, they will do everything in their power to jack up the house price. Adam Smith says so, and he’s right.
But if realtors were paid a flat (and still egregiously fat) fee of, say, $5000 regardless of the sale price, then they would start acting like decent human beings and actually care for their local communities.
Can you hear the realtor howls already? “Oh, but I have costs!” Sure you do. Fine. Then let’s scrap the commission, scrap the $5000 fee, and you can charge for hard marketing costs + an hourly fee for your time.
If we eradicated commissions in favor of set or hourly fees, the benefits to society would be massive:
- Realtors would stop all their shady tactics (and all the shady realtors would have to go get a real job)
- Buyers and sellers would save tens of thousands of dollars on commissions.
- Realtors would stop trying to jack up house prices, causing hardship for hundreds of millions and homelessness for hundreds of thousands.
- The real estate bubble would cool, which would decrease inflation and strengthen our purchasing power.
- Realtors would start protecting their communities from predators like Airbnb, land-lorders, Jeff Bezos, and trillion-dollar rent-trapping monopolies, and instead, do everything in their power to get homes into the hands of locals.
In other words, real estate agents would be incentivized to do what they’re actually supposed to do: seek the highest and best use of a property for real human beings, not for community-shattering corporate profits.
After a few years as a real estate agent, I became a real estate broker and a mortgage broker.
And then one day I woke up and realized I hated it. I was tired of selling people houses they didn’t need at prices they couldn’t afford.
So I quit the great Canadian con and decided to fight for justice and equality and a less-corrupt society instead.
I want the world to know the truth:
That real estate agents are overpaid parasites who are incentivized with massive commissions to do everything in their power to overinflate the price of human shelter and sell out our children’s futures to the highest corporate bidder.
Spread the word.
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Author Jared A. Brock
