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CINC CEO Alvaro Erize recently hosted a webinar reviewing how the real estate industry has actually changed since the 2024 NAR settlement and the media storm that followed. Joined by top CINC client and agent Jessica, the conversation moved through two years of industry history, commission data, and a practical look at where online lead generation stands today. The core message: the fundamentals that make great agents valuable have not changed, and the numbers prove it.
Watch the full webinar here and read the summary below.
A Brief History of Industry Threats
Alvaro opened by tracing the major scares the industry has faced since 2015, using each as context for the current AI-driven anxiety about the agent's future.
Zillow's Zestimate was the first. The fear was that if buyers and sellers could look up a home's value on their own, they would stop needing agents. What actually happened: FSBOs dropped from 13% in 2008 to roughly 5% today, an all-time low. The data point is clear. Access to pricing information did not make the transaction easier for individuals to handle.
Next came Redfin, which launched with 1% seller commissions and 2% rebates to buyers. Alvaro framed this as the real test: if you give away the same service for a fraction of the price and spend $500 million in marketing to tell the world about it, what happens? Redfin accumulated over $500 million in losses, never captured more than 0.78% market share, and was eventually acquired. Total industry commissions did not drop. If anything, they held steady or increased.
The iBuyer collapse followed. Private equity-backed companies assumed national scale could replace local expertise. It could not. Flipping houses requires knowing markets, managing repairs, and pricing accurately at the neighborhood level. None of that transfers to a centralized model.
The takeaway: each wave of disruption predicted the end of the agent, and each time the agent's value proved more durable than the prediction.
What Actually Happened After the Settlement
The settlement produced a concentrated set of conditions Alvaro described as unlike anything in his decade at CINC: a presidential statement on national television telling buyers to negotiate commissions, major news outlets running headlines claiming the 6% commission was gone, and widespread industry fear that the buyer-side commission was finished.
The data tells a different story.
Average buyer-side commissions dropped approximately 0.10 to 0.15 percentage points in 2024, from about 2.55% to 2.42%. By 2025 and into 2026, they have been flat to slightly rising. On the sell side, the pattern is nearly identical. The changes in states like California and Oregon are somewhat more pronounced, but even there the variance is modest compared to what the headlines suggested.
Two opposing trends have effectively canceled each other out: a small number of agents moved to flat fees, while strong agents, empowered by the buyer agreement requirement, successfully secured commissions at 3% or above, where they used to settle at 2.5%. The net result across the industry is almost zero change.
Alvaro's pointed observation: Redfin spent $500 million specifically targeting commission sensitivity and failed to move the number. The president of the United States addressed it on live television and failed to move the number. That level of resistance to price pressure is a signal about the nature of the service, not the structure of the market.
The Buyer Agreement: A Real and Positive Shift
The one NAR rule change Alvaro considered genuinely good for the industry is the written buyer representation requirement before showing a home. Adoption is still lower than expected, around 50% of transactions, partly because enforcement is inconsistent. But agents who are using it report real benefits.
The buyer agreement forces a direct conversation about value early in the relationship, before the buyer has emotionally committed to a home. It gives agents the opportunity to set their fee, explain their work, and establish trust before any urgency kicks in. Jessica shared her direct experience: buyers who understand the value of representation have, in multiple cases, voluntarily covered the difference when the seller would not, because they felt the agent had earned it.
For buyers, the transparency is genuine. They know what they are potentially paying before they fall in love with a property. The one remaining gap Alvaro flagged: MLS listings no longer show whether a seller is offering co-broke, which means buyers do not always know upfront what the full cost structure looks like for a given home. That is a real transparency problem, even if the buyer agreement addresses part of it.
Buy-Side Lead Generation: Where the Economics Make Sense
Alvaro closed with a data-driven case for buyer-side home search leads as the most efficient online lead generation strategy for agents and teams.
Three times more GCI is generated nationally from online buyer leads than from seller leads. Buyer leads can be acquired for $7 to $9 each when managed well. Seller leads range from $25 to $500. Referral-based models cost 35 to 42% per closed transaction, which often means $4,000 or more per sale. That math does not compound well.
The other notable data point: home prices have risen roughly 50% since 2015, while the cost of a home search lead today is essentially unchanged from a decade ago. The lead has become significantly cheaper relative to the commission it can produce.
Key operational realities from CINC's data:
- 40% of closings from home search leads happen within the first six months. Long-term nurture matters, but speed and consistency in the early window are critical.
- 12% of leads become what CINC calls "agent-ready," meaning they have had multiple back-and-forth exchanges with AI and expressed clear intent.
- Those 12% of leads account for 40% of all transactions. Yet only 30% of them are contacted within the first hour.
Alvaro's most direct point to the room: if you want to improve conversion without changing your lead volume, start by fixing your follow-up on agent-ready leads. AI handles the initial engagement around the clock. The agent's job is to show up when the lead is ready to talk to a human.
For volume, he recommended a minimum of 70 to 100 new leads per month per dedicated agent to hit meaningful conversion numbers at scale. At that volume, with consistent follow-up and AI handling first contact, the cost per closed transaction can reach $750 to $2,000, well below what referral and seller-lead models produce.
The Bigger Point
Alvaro's closing observations were less about tactics and more about posture. Every major threat to the real estate agent over the past decade came with serious institutional backing: venture capital, presidential endorsements, national media narratives. None of them changed the underlying economics because none of them changed what agents actually do for clients in the highest-stakes transaction of their lives.
The risk he flagged for the next wave of disruption, currently framed around AI, is not that the technology will replace the agent. It is that agents will talk themselves into lowering their standards or their rates before any external force requires them to. The data from the past two years is the strongest case against that outcome.
Buyer commissions are flat to rising. Buyer agreements are creating better conversations. Home search leads are producing returns that compound over time. The agents doing well are charging more, not less.