Regarding “Home-Sales Commissions Under Fire” (U.S. News, Sept. 21): Big Tech has trained us to expect near-zero transaction costs or at least have them hidden from view. It’s therefore no surprise that transparent fees or commissions associated with seldom-purchased, big-ticket items such as real estate seem antiquated.

But the current discussion ignores the benefits paid for by these transaction costs. The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) marketplace of residential-real-estate listings and historic data is unique to the U.S….


A woman looks at real-estate listings at an office in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Photo: brendan mcdermid/Reuters

Regarding “Home-Sales Commissions Under Fire” (U.S. News, Sept. 21): Big Tech has trained us to expect near-zero transaction costs or at least have them hidden from view. It’s therefore no surprise that transparent fees or commissions associated with seldom-purchased, big-ticket items such as real estate seem antiquated.

But the current discussion ignores the benefits paid for by these transaction costs. The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) marketplace of residential-real-estate listings and historic data is unique to the U.S. and Canada. Agents enter billions of data points for millions of residential properties by the rules and regulations of the National Association of Realtors and state and local affiliates. This effort is largely self-organized and creates an incredible richness of transparency of data. Agents work mostly on commission and lack benefits such as healthcare, retirement or paid leave.

This transparency extends to the process of how properties are listed and the unique arrangement of offering cooperation and a sharing of commission to any agent in the marketplace who has an interested buyer. Imagine a car salesman sharing a commission with any other salesman in his region who brings in a buyer and negotiates the car’s sales price.

The current discussion ignores the benefits this system has for consumers, including freedom of agency and the relentless and fierce competition among agents for those consumers in every market of the U.S. The buyer-agent commission is a prerequisite for competitive cooperation and listing properties on MLS. Should it become a thing of the past, we will see the demise of the current MLS system: realtor-organized data collection, cooperation and transparency, as executed by hundreds of thousands of realtors on a daily basis.

Joseph Stein

San Mateo, Calif.