Bonus Episode! Super Producer Leigh Brown: Everything you need to know about the NAR Settlement!

Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between, broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Dead Men Walking starts now.

Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Doctrine Podcast. I'm your host Greg Moore.

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Www .kandkfurnishings .com. They're a sponsor of the show. Love those guys. Go check them out. Make sure we support them. Now that the business is out of the way, got an exciting one here. As you guys know, if you've been listening for almost four years, I've talked about everything.

We've had comedians on, and congressmen on, and scholars, and pastors, right? But the interesting thing about this podcast is I'm a little selfish, so I get to have people on that interest me, and hopefully it interests you, and we bring you guys good value and content.

And you know that I'm in the real estate business. I've been a broker for 12 years. That's my full-time job, my real job, as I tell people. I wear a lot of hats, but that's the one that pays the bills, and honestly, it's probably the most rewarding outside of being an elected official.

But all that, and a father, and a husband. Okay, it's maybe like fifth down, but it's still really high up there in real estate. So we're going to talk real estate today, because there's a lot of stuff going on in the real estate industry.

I came across this guest that's going to be on today just a few months ago, and I went, why has she not shown up in my algorithm? I mean, it felt like a Step Brothers episode when I was watching it. I went, geez, did we just become best friends after three videos?

Because I think our trains are running on the same track. So Lee is an author, public speaker, and real estate professional. She has served as the president of North Carolina Board of Realtors, written multiple award-winning books, and has a very successful YouTube channel, which we're going to talk about as well, focusing on real estate and policy.

She's sassy, she's Southern, and she's with us today. It's Lee Brown. Lee, how are you?

I'm super honored to be with you, and I guess if you've got a priority list, I'll be doing good to be like 11 or 12, so I kind of love that thinking out loud. It's great.

Yeah, as soon as I said that out loud, I went, well, I better fill the wife, the kids. Uh-oh, they don't listen to the podcast, let's be honest. But if they do, we got to put them up there too. Joy of my life.

So you and I are both in real estate. I've also watched some of your videos on policy. Obviously, as realtors, we understand that there's some stuff going on with a NAR settlement. But first, can you just give us the little Reader's Digest 30 to 60 second bio of you and how you came into that?

And I just showed my age by saying Reader's Digest, all the Gen Zs out there going, what are you talking about? But yeah, give us a little background on you and how you even got into real estate and what you're doing now.

Leigh Brown’s Background in Real Estate and Policy

Well, here, while they're Googling, I'll just say TV Guide. And now they'll be busy for days. I'm a 24-year realtor. I am in Concord, North Carolina, where I own an independent brokerage. I got into the business with my dad, who's a career realtor.

He's retired now. I came to this business after finding out the corporate world wasn't for me. So I sold chainsaws. I worked on Wall Street. And this is my home. This very crazy business. Really, you're a servant leader to survive in real estate.

And in the past 15 years, I've also, in addition to building my brokerage, I've done a lot of policy work for the local, state, and national level. I have run for office unsuccessfully. So I'm the failed congressional candidate right here.

But that's because that's not my mission field, so I'm fine. But I have gotten myself very involved in the politics of real estate as a way to serve the profession on the bigger picture.

Yeah, no, that's so good.

I have a husband, too.

I got messed up.

I got a husband.

I got two kids.

I got an amazing church home where the Holy Ghost shows up all the time and rattles our cages.

So there you go.

We'll fix that.

Yeah, I know.

You get realtors together, and they forget that they have wife and kids and families and husbands and everything else. But you started talking real estate. No, absolutely. So yeah, I've noticed, too, that policy goes hand-in-hand with real estate.

And it's funny you mention that. I was in a Fortune 100 company, thought I was on the VP track. And then my father, who had been in real estate for about eight years at that point, said, hey, do you want to come do this crazy thing where we're doing thousands and thousands of BPOs?

Or at least I think we can. And most realtors look at me and go, a broker priced opinion? Those are paying like $50, $80. Why would you want to do that? Go take pictures and write a report. Well, I came on, and we hired full-time typists and full-time drivers.

And we're doing 75 ,000 BPOs a year as a little three-realtor brokerage. And I tell realtors that, and they go, you're insane. And I go, well, it was just that niche. You find something, and you're good at it.

So I was in 44 different counties in the state of Michigan. And you could tell me a street 17 counties away, and I could tell you the value of that house because my guys or myself were up there valuing it for banks and attorneys and municipalities.

And I say all that to say, yeah, I jumped out of a six-figure job in corporate America with full health insurance when my wife was pregnant with our first child and went into, hey, let's not be homeless next month.

Let's start a business. But that's kind of the attitude I find in a lot of really good realtors of like, I'm going to forge my way. I'm going to figure this out. I want to bring value to my client. All those things you do.

So when we have something like this, a shifting, as you would say, or as we could say, in the industry, it's important to talk about it. So I want to talk about it right up top. Maybe you can give us a little explanation from your view of the NARS settlement that's been in the news the last week or so.

And we have agents, buyers, sellers, everyone kind of freaking out a little bit about it going, what does this mean? Could you give us your take on that? Maybe touch on those?

What the NAR Settlement Means for Consumers and Agents

So I'll speak to it from two viewpoints. And the first one is the consumer standpoint. You probably don't know what we're talking about because unless you read the mainstream media, this may not have come across your feed.

And because y 'all are listening to a very wise podcast, you already know that when the mainstream media has one talking point spread across all their headlines, they have received their talking points from the bureaucracy.

So you're getting bad information that says there's no more commission, agents are dead. That's patently untrue and it's just designed to cause you to stop calling the realtors. So we'll talk more about what the settlement means, but consumers, if you read a headline, that's fine I guess, but read down to the last paragraph where they usually hide the facts and then you just go ahead and call your realtor for information.

If you're an agent, you're thinking, oh my god, Lee Brown, everybody knows about this. I can't breathe, I can't die. Well, that's because we live in our silo of real estate and we have trained the algorithms to bring us real estate information so those of us in the business feel like this is earth shattering, everything's over, it is the apocalypse, it's not even April 8th yet and we're going to talk about that because there's some wild things shaping up there from the prophecy standpoint, but anyway.

And so real estate people are looking at this settlement thinking real estate's over and of course the truth is somewhere between those two things. The settlement that's happening in real estate is on the heels of a class action lawsuit where the realtors lost in October and when I say the realtors, I mean the National Association of Realtors, the world's largest grassroots trade association, over one and a half million members and four of the largest brands, Remax, Keller Williams, Anywhere Brands, which would be Cobol Bankers, C21, Sotheby's, Better Homes and Gardens, and Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, a .k .a. Warren Buffett.

So those were the four companies sued along with the National Association. Three of the four settled. Home Services, Berkshire Hathaway, is still figuring out what they're going to do and then you have the National Association of Realtors.

What they accused us of is not telling people how compensation happened. It's patently untrue. Now there may have been some agents out there that didn't explain things well, but let's call it what it is.

Every home seller that showed up as a plaintiff had signed a listing agreement with their agent and they had information fully disclosed until class action lawyers came in and muddied the waters and said, we want to go get these realtors who make too much money because class action lawyers obviously are just like those pastors that run the furniture shop.

They're doing it for the good of mankind and not for their own pocketbooks, and I speak with a high level of sarcasm there. So you have a pretty nasty setup to destroy the realtors in the pursuit of money, forgetting that realtors are all independent entrepreneurs, most of whom live below the poverty line because as you've already acknowledged, it's hard to find your space in real estate.

It's a very hard hustle business. The ones who make it are really survival people with a high level of discipline and hustle, and most people fail out of real estate. But of course, none of that was addressed in the lawsuit to take us down.

What most people don't know is that the Department of Justice has been trying to take down real estate for a long time, and they did have their thumb on the scale in this settlement because they would like realtors to go away simply because consumers don't want to deal with realtors.

If you believe what's said on the internet, I take that with a grain of salt. Most consumers know they're going to do real estate two, three, four times in a lifetime, and between those transactions,.

Laws change,.

Practices change, consumer behaviors change, the mechanics of real estate change, and they rely on that local realtor professional to help them get through the process. The system knows that if you remove the realtor, a lot of the public would say, forget it.

I give up. Too hard. I'll just rent. So there's a lot of underlying currents going on. The settlement right now is proposed, and what the settlement says, that's all your little backstory on what it is.

The main point of the settlement is, historically, in our multiple listing service, which realtors pay to have access to, it's a paid membership, and it is egalitarian. It is the freest and fairest marketplace on earth.

If I become a member of your multiple listing service in Michigan, I've sold zero houses in Michigan, but I have access to the same information that you have access to as someone who's been productive for over a decade, and vice versa.

The system doesn't care what color you are, what language you speak, who you're sleeping with. The system just says, if you've paid your dues, you can have access to the information. The system required sellers to make any offer of compensation universal.

It did not tell them how much to make it. It said it had to be universal, so if you offer it to one, you have to offer it to all. Again, free and fair marketplace. What the settlement says is that sellers can no longer make a universal offer of compensation.

Buyers can ask to have their agent compensated through the system, but sellers cannot offer it. It's taking a very efficient system and making it inefficient. For you consumer people, you're thinking, what does that mean to me, Lee Brown?

I don't belong to the MLS. When you're ready to buy a home, you know better than to go to a website and click, add to cart, and shazam, you have a house because it's a very intricate transaction which involves your taxes, your finances, your savings, your title, your marriage, everything, your estate, the whole kit and caboodle is wrapped up.

You want that realtor professional. Well, now it's been said that you will have to pay that agent out of pocket. For some of y 'all, you're like, that's fine. Dollars in, dollars out. It's all fungible.

You're my educated listeners. You who are also educated but say, I don't have a big pocket of money, Lee Brown. What am I supposed to do? Well, you're going to have to figure out how to wrap it into the transaction, either in the way we used to by asking the seller to help cover the cost of your agent or by your lender allowing you to roll it in.

So again, the same dollars, same transaction used to be efficient is now about to be wildly inefficient, but good realtors will figure out how to guide you through the process because your outcome matters to us and the banking system will eventually respond.

There's just going to be a period of chaos because as we all know, the banking regulations, the government regulations don't exactly move in short order timeframes.

Buyer Costs, VA Loans, and the Risk of Going Without Representation

Yeah. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm agreeing with you that it seemed to go from efficient to inefficient, which in my estimation, usually is what happens when the government kind of gets involved and the DOJ gets involved.

They take something that was working in the free market pretty well and everyone was happy on both sides or at least compromised on both sides and they go, oh, we're going to stick a wrench in it because the way I see it, and correct me if I'm wrong, I mean, why can't we write in concessions or lender financed payment or there's all these other less inefficient ways to do it.

It looks like the settlement didn't really.

Say anything.

About that. Am I right in thinking there's just going to be five or six different ways to do this and probably not the best way, but it's still going to kind of flow that way because as you know, and I think in most markets, buyers are pretty strapped.

We've seen home prices go up. We've seen bank accounts go down. We've seen rates go up. So most of my buyers, unless they're selling a home or they're in that certain tier financially, they might not have that extra $3 ,000, $5 ,000, $8 ,000, $10 ,000 to pay an agent.

Well, and they don't want to, right? Not necessarily they don't have it and many of them don't because I work with a lot of first-time buyers, but there's other places for their dollars to go. We're in an inflationary environment where going to the grocery store feels really painful.

Filling up your gas tank is no small thing and then your kids bring home a permission slip for a field trip and you've got to find that money. People have so many uses for their money, they'd rather have it really wrapped in the way it traditionally has been.

But to speak to the different ways that it can be structured, well, that relies on another party. So now you've got to call your bank and say, Dear Mr. Bank, will you allow me to pay my commissions through concessions?

It may or may not be allowed because as you reference the higher interest rate environment, many of our really savvy clients have said, Hey, can I do the buy-downs we used to see once upon a time? Actually, before you got into business, this is how old I am.

We used to have higher interest rates and your older audience remembers historically the rates have been between 6 and 7%. They've just now come back to that. But if you give some extra money to your lender, you can take it from 7 to 6 and lower your monthly payment, but that's a concession.

So now, can you simultaneously do that and pay your agent and not come out of pocket? Well, those are rules that are going to have to change. The biggest problem we have is that this is a direct hit on our veterans because the VA loan program, which is arguably the one benefit the government gets right for our veterans and our honorably discharged service people, it's a very efficient loan program.

Our veterans can buy a property with zero down, with a good interest rate and with low fees. However, there's a rule inside the VA program. Veterans are not allowed to compensate their own agent, even if they want to.

Even if they said, you know what? You're worth every penny. Let me pay you. The VA loan program does not permit a veteran to compensate their agent. They can only have their agent compensated through the seller and the listing broker in the traditional way.

I'm either fortunate or unfortunate to have friends that are high up in the VA through the work that I've done and talking to them is let's just say it's painful.

When I have had.

Conversations with the VA over the.

Past six, no,.

Seven years, 2017 is the first time I went on the record arguing about this rule needing to be changed because that's how long this stuff has been in the pipeline. Please take that rule out. Let veterans do what everybody else does.

Roll it in, pay it out of pocket, have the seller pay it, whatever. Give the veterans freedom. The VA's response to me was always, but the system works fine and sellers will pay the veteran's agent. I'm saying you're not listening to me.

You need to be prepared in the event of change. Now we're facing change that is 90 days away and veterans as it stands right now, their agents are not allowed to receive compensation through the MLS unless the seller says yes.

If the seller says no, the veteran can't pay an agent. Now what do they do? They go without an agent. It's ridiculous to me that you have one class of people that's being treated poorly and it happens to be the one class of people who give us the freedoms that we're talking about right here, right now.

Why Buyers Need Representation in a Tight Housing Market

Wow. Yeah. That kind of rolls us into something I wanted to focus on for a few minutes too is just how this affects potential buyers because I really, both buyers and sellers, but buyers specifically because there's going to be some buyers out there that go, hey, I want to go at it alone.

I don't want an agent whether I'm paying or not and hey, more power to you if you can. Every time I've been approached with that subject, I can rattle off maybe 10 or 12 or 15 things that I've personally experienced and just say, how would you handle that?

How would you handle your rezone or your setbacks or your inspection or it needs waterproofing or your taxes that are prorated or how much of an EMD? How do you do if they dispute that? There's so many things as you know that we go through on both the buyers and the seller side as agents where usually when I present that, I'm pretty good at presenting my value anyway to a buyer or seller.

They go, oh yeah, I'm not scaring them but I'm being realistic. This is what could happen in a real estate transaction. I just closed on one two days ago. Oh my goodness, Lee. It was up and down. I mean, it felt like it was, you know those ones, right?

It's never getting in. We got to the closing table and it was everyone was jumping for joy. My point is I feel like with this decision the buyers are going to be hurt the most.

Just because.

There's going to be now a lack of representation possibly. You might have look at an agent doesn't want to work for free. We have families to feed, right? We need to make money as well and I think we're valuable and we should.

The Bible says, pay a man what he's worth or count it evil unto you. So I'm for that but at the same time you're going to have some buyers that are going in blind, maybe first time. I have a second time home buyer right now.

He didn't even know how I get paid. He goes out the first time my wife handled it. So hey Greg, how much do I pay you? That's what he said to me two weeks ago. 42 years old and I've known him 35 years.

I go, you don't pay me. I'm working with the broker on the right. So there's buyers out there, all ages, all stripes that just don't know and they'll get into a situation where then they're not represented.

I feel like how is any of this not taken into account when the judge and the DOJ were going through this was just as blatant. Hey, we don't care what the effects are going to be and we don't care what the industry experts are saying on the realtor side.

We're just going to do what we want. I know you can't speculate about that but what do you feel was going on there?

The Trial, the DOJ, and Negative Messaging Against Realtors

Well, I've read the transcripts from the trial and I will just say that one of the most powerful things any of us has available to us is the ability to tell a story. I mean, look at how Jesus communicated with his people.

He communicated through parables because he knew that just telling the truth would not catch people and help them process it to understand it. When you look at how the trial went, the realtors, we did not story tell effectively.

We did not explain the day-to-day work of the practitioner. We had people giving testimony who are very nice and smart people but are not day-to-day active practitioners. You had a jury pool that was half owners, half renters, which means half of them have at least been in the process and half of them have not.

So there was also a terrible voice there in the jury pool selection and I think that was a failure on the part of the legal team. That's me playing armchair quarterback. Wasn't in the courtroom. I'm not a lawyer.

I just watch them on TV. But I do know that you had an unfair audience and then we did not try to convert them to our side through the powerful things that we've all seen and said and done. So when you look at how that went down, that could I think been handled better.

When you look at the other side of it though, we have a sitting president who on Tuesday, March 19th in Nevada gave remarks saying that realtors need to bring their fees down to reduce the cost of housing.

You have a press secretary, I hesitate to call her that, but you have a press secretary, that's her title I guess, who said on Wednesday, March 20th that realtors' fees are junk fees. So you have a messaging coming out of your current administration that is blatantly derogatory towards realtors because they don't understand what we do either.

I doubt that Corrine Jean-Pierre or Joe Biden have actually talked to a practicing realtor that they've had to scratch a down payment together and figure out inspections and surveys and all those pieces because either someone's handled it for them or it's been a long time since they messed with it.

So they've lost touch with the reality too. And then you have to address the fact that every single day there is a headline that says renting is better than buying. You will be a renter. Renting is good.

The Gen Z's will never be able to buy a house. The American Dream is dead. And there's all of this negative messaging around real estate which I think fed the outcome of the lawsuit as much or more that the courtroom conversation did.

Housing, Hedge Funds, and the Future of Property Ownership

We're going to go off subject here just a little bit and I don't want to seem too conspiratorial but I'm a realist. So I kind of look at the world as a whole and you say, what makes sense?

You go, well if.

A's happening and B's happening then probably we're aiming towards C. And I've seen over the last 10 or 15 years that we've seen a real push towards you will owe nothing and you'll be happy. WF comes out and says that and there's all these global leads that really like the idea of subscription based and leasing and renting.

And I look at a decision like this and I go Yeah and it's horrible that I even have to preference that with saying conspiratorial when these are just things that they come out right and say, look this is where we would like to go as a global community.

And I go, well one of the great ways to get people into renting is remove those couple million agents that are the last line of defense for both buyers and sellers. And I'm not being I'm not, this isn't hyper you know, hyperbole.

This is, I've been in the trenches, you've been in the trenches, you understand your fiduciary responsibility to your client. For all those listeners out there that aren't in this industry we're talking a language you might not quite understand until you use a good agent that is going up to bat for you and defending you and making sure that they're protecting you against whatever it is laws and rezonings and assessments and taxes and all these things that come across your way.

And I went, boy, what a great way to just to move towards that goal. Now, I'm not saying that there was anyone in the DOJ office saying, hey, make this decision or at NAR saying make this settlement. But boy, just like you said, we've had this attitude now for the last eight or ten years.

And then a decision like this comes down, the White House saying junk fees. I mean, it's insulting really. I would love to see Geriatric Joe come do my job for one day. And look, I know he's the president respect the office, but I have no lost feelings for Joe Biden and his policies.

So it seems very like it's pushing towards one goal and I kind of feel like as someone who's been in the business a long time like you and have lots of experience, you kind of step back and look at the big picture and you're kind of maybe seeing that same thing.

We're not actually conspiracy theorists. We are coincidence spotters. And so all we're doing is spotting coincidences here. I'll just point that out. It goes back to your friend that you spoke with the second time homebuyer.

This is infrequent for them. And so because it's infrequent, that's where the realtor really does come in and keep the process moving forward because if he let his wife handle it last time and he's handling it this time, they're probably both busy.

They're probably at the age of, you said, 41. At that age, they're probably managing kids, which means they are chauffeurs as much as they are anything else. They're working. They've got life going on.

And so if they think about buying a house, our markets right now are suffering from a lack of supply, which means that if you see a house you like, you do not have a week and a half to say, oh, did I call the realtor?

No. You're either jumping on it right away or you've missed the house. And so if they jump on something right away because the market's moving, well, now what? And it's those next steps that keep a lot of buyers from buying when they start to go through the process with the lender and everything else that's involved.

So if you start adding up all those pieces, it is the realtor that does grab them by the hand and say, I got you, and explain it and answer it, explain it and answer it for weeks on end until we get them to closing, not pushing anyone, but encouraging and answering the whole way through in what is for most people a foreign process.

And this is where a good realtor does stand out from a bad realtor, and I don't think either one of us is making apologies for the bad agents out there. There have always been bad agents. There are bad actors in every single profession.

Real estate is not unique to that. I think the only thing that's unique when it comes to real estate is that every transaction is different because of all those humans involved, and because every transaction is different, the skills of the agent are going to be different transaction to transaction, so I'm needed to behave differently in an estate sale than with a first-time buyer because I'm handling a different type of process with a different desired outcome based on the humans involved, and that has huge value.

So if you start looking at how much we have kept the American Dream alive as little tiny micro-businesses, market by market, well, now let's look back at 2008. Do you know what happened in 2008? Most of us that were in and around real estate were painfully aware of what was happening in real estate because the wheels had come off the 18-wheeler and it had gone straight down the hill.

It wasn't even done going down the hill. Well, in 2008, that was the first time that the banks started selling foreclosures to hedge funds. Prior to 2008, the investment world was controlled by investors like you and me, the mom and pops.

The hedge funds swooped in because the banks had a great swath of foreclosures and they enjoyed selling them as a portfolio package to reduce friction and cost in the process. Well, the hedge funds figured out very quickly these are wonderful performing assets and so you start to see them pick up more and more properties.

You fast forward to today and the thumbprints of BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard are on so much in and around real estate, whether it is the automated valuation models that are being proposed to replace appraisers, whether it is the purchasing of individual houses, or whether it's the building of whole neighborhoods, the BTR movement, which is known as Build-to-Rent, and for those of y 'all that aren't aware, that's an entire subdivision looking area of single family homes, little fenced yards, little stone, little vinyl, very cute, some hardwoods and granite.

Don't we love it? But nothing is for sale. Everything is owned by a hedge fund. So the renters in there feel like homeowners, but they are not homeowners, and so there's also a psychological effect happening there.

But you go through and look at this, and there's a stated goal of the ESG funders, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, to own 30 of U .S. housing stock. Why do they want to own that much housing stock?

Well, it's a great performing asset, but it's also a control mechanism because if you don't own the property, you're less likely to be heated up about property taxes. You're less likely to clean up the monument, show up at the schools, and be involved in community.

So, as much as we sound like we are down a rabbit hole here, everything I have just said is verifiable. Everything has been stated on the record and is shown historically. And so as realtors, we think our job is always to gather information and tell you, because you the consumer, you the agent, you are grown people, generally pretty good at making decisions.

And what I would say right now from the Lee Brown perspective on things, and I'm going to wager you'd agree with me here, you buy real estate right now, if you can, somewhere, because you need to be locking down your piece of real estate before we see the next level of attacks on this beautiful example of what the American dream is.

Seller Strategy, Housing Supply, and Why Commissions Don’t Lower Prices

No, I 100 agree. My grandfather told me at 7 years old, they're not making any more dirt, and I ended up being a realtor, so it must have stuck with me, you know, a very wise man. So, let's shift gears here as we wind this down.

I don't want to get too nuanced, but there's going to be a lot of people that are going to listen to this that are realtors or in the industry or possibly going to sell their house. What does this mean for the seller this decision?

Because I've always positioned myself at the listing table as look, you're going to pay me this percentage, and then I'm going to handle the buyer, and I want to make sure the buyer is represented so we have a smooth transaction and that buyer doesn't freak out about something that might happen and that they have a professional working on their end.

So I've never said, oh, you're paying me, and then I'm paying them. It's just, look, here's my fee, and out of that, don't worry, I'll take care of the buyer side of that. Because it's really what's happening is broker and broker getting together and exchanging monies.

The seller isn't really technically exchanging any monies, right? So how does this decision change for sellers and seller's agents then? When they're sitting at that listing table, or you know, when the seller says, well, I don't want to pay, I don't present it that way, but a lot of agents do.

I don't want to pay a buyer's agent. What would you say a response to that would be, or what would you say I guess the thought process should be for both the agent and the seller?

Well, the first thing is, it's always the seller's choice what they pay, and it's the agent's choice as to what they accept. So if you can't come to an agreement, then you shake hands and part ways. It's always been like that because we've always negotiated with people.

So the conversation just changes for me if my seller says, but I don't really want to compensate a buyer's agent. I think they should pay their own agent. I understand and I value their viewpoint. What I ask them is, if an offer comes to us and there is a request to pay the buyer's agent, I'm going to ask you to consider that because if that buyer doesn't have the funds, I don't want that buyer to lose out on home ownership because we were unwilling to work with them.