As Sitzer | Burnett Trial Winds Down, Plan For What’s Next: The Download

No one can predict the future, but you can prepare. Find out what to prepare for and pick up the tools you’ll need at the Virtual Inman Connect on Nov. 1-2, 2023. And don’t miss Inman Connect New York on Jan. 23-25, 2024, where AI, capital, and more will be center stage. Bet big on the future and join us at Connect.

Each week on The Download, Inman’s Christy Murdock takes a deeper look at the top-read stories of the week to give you what you’ll need to meet Monday head-on. This week: Get to know the plaintiffs in Sitzer | Burnett and plan for the changes ahead.

If, like many of Inman’s readership, you’ve been breathlessly following the play-by-play of the Sitzer | Burnett trial, you may be hunkered down in the daily arguments and objections of this unfolding saga.

Well, as the arguments wind down and the jury begins to deliberate, it’s time to lift up your head and get busy thinking about next steps. After all, the time to think about your response isn’t after everything’s done. If you want to be truly competitive in tomorrow’s real estate market, you’ve always got to be forward-focused.

One thing I think we’ve all learned over the past weeks is that communication matters, whether it’s the way you communicate with your clients or the things you’re learning from trainers and coaches.

If you’re an agent, you need to be creating content to communicate with leads and clients about the outcome of the lawsuit.
If you’re a team leader or broker, you need to be thinking about how you’re going to help your agents with up-to-date training, strategies and client communication.
If you’re a trainer or coach, you need to be scouring your past content and your online platforms for anything that now sounds like bad advice.

This week in The Download, we’re ready to start asking the right questions and taking the right steps to prepare for what’s next.

They’ve caused an industrywide shake-up, but who are they? As part of Andrea Brambila’s gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial, she profiled the plaintiffs in the case, Missourians who represent some half a million homesellers alleging nearly $2 billion in damages.

The rule under scrutiny is an NAR policy known variously as the participation or cooperative compensation rule. It requires listing brokers to offer some type of compensation to buyer brokers in order to submit a listing to a Realtor-aligned MLS.

The issue here isn’t bad service; all of the plaintiffs say they were satisfied with the services of the agent they worked with. Instead, they take issue with the idea of paying a buyer’s agent to negotiate against their interests, driving up their costs and minimizing the profit on their sale.

As the jury begins to deliberate, agents and brokers are looking ahead to what’s next — and taking on some of the information that’s come out in the trial thus far. Whatever the decision in this case, there’ll be appeals and arguments along with yet another upcoming case addressing many of the same issues.

It just makes sense, then, to get ahead of some of the adjustments that may be on the horizon by examining the way you do business now, the content you’ve created and shared, along with the coaching and training materials you use. After all, the more agile and proactive you can be, the better you’ll be able to respond to whatever comes next.

58 questions agents should be asking about commission lawsuits

Broker Cara Ameer helps you think through the implications of the current bombshell commission lawsuits — from buyer breaches to payments to MLS rules (or the lack thereof) — and what they may mean for your business.

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