Nearly every big real estate website you have used is not a real estate brokerage. It is a lead generation business. Understanding the difference is worth a few minutes of your time, because it quietly shapes who calls you back and how much room that person has to work with you on price.
You asked about one house. What you submitted was not a question, it was a lead. That lead is matched to an agent who paid to receive it. That agent usually works at some other brokerage, in some other part of town, and may never have seen the house you asked about. In exchange for the introduction, the agent agrees to pay the platform a referral fee out of whatever commission they eventually earn. In the programs we see in this market, that fee commonly runs 30% to 40% of the agent's commission, taken off the top at closing.
None of that is hidden exactly, but none of it is on the form you filled out either.
We are not going to tell you that a referral fee makes your house cost more. We cannot prove that and it is not the point. The point is simpler and harder to argue with.
Every agent has a number in their head, the least they are willing to earn to take on a transaction and all the work and liability that comes with it. What you negotiate with them is not what they keep. Their brokerage takes a share. Their costs come out of what is left. And if a platform is also taking 30% to 40% before anybody else gets paid, the agent has to start from a higher number to land on the same net.
So the question to ask any agent who contacts you is not what their rate is. It is how many hands are in it before theirs. An agent who keeps what they negotiate has room to negotiate. An agent who already owes a third of it to the website that introduced you has considerably less.
An illustration, not a quote. Suppose an agent negotiates a fee of $9,000 on a sale. A 35% referral fee is $3,150 to the platform, leaving $5,850 before the agent's brokerage split and before any of their own costs. To end up where $9,000 would have put them without the referral fee, the same agent has to negotiate roughly $13,800. Real numbers vary by agent, by brokerage and by deal. The direction does not.
This site is run by MORE, REALTORS®, a licensed real estate brokerage that lists and sells homes across the two state St. Louis metro, in Missouri and in Illinois. We are not a directory pointing you somewhere else. When you call the number on this site, the person who answers is a licensed agent in our own brokerage, able to pull up the listing you are looking at, open the seller's disclosures on it and tell you what the last three comparable sales on that street actually closed for.
Like most brokerages, our agents are licensed independent contractors rather than employees. That is normal and it is not the distinction that matters. The distinction that matters is that they are our agents, accountable to this brokerage and to its broker, and that no referral fee leaves your transaction on the way to the person helping you.
Real estate commissions are fully negotiable. They are not set, suggested or standardized by any multiple listing service, association of REALTORS®, or by us. What you pay, and what any agent charges, is agreed between you and that agent in writing. Ask more than one. Ask what is included. Ask who else gets paid out of it.
One call, one brokerage, no referral fee. Ask us anything about any listing on this site.
866.STL.MLS1