The process of buying a home has seemingly never been simpler: Find a property on a listings website like Zillow, Redfin or Trulia; reach out to the listing agent; tour the property; and make an offer.

But for years behind the scenes, experts say, consumers have not been fully aware of the ultimate cost — and potential conflicts of interest — when searching for a home.

Now, a landmark settlement with the National Association of Realtors is poised to upend this model. According to consumer advocates, and even some realtors, it’s a win for homebuyers and sellers.

“Price transparency is a good thing, increased competition is a good thing, and this will increase both,” said Mariya Letdin, an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Business. “I really welcome this change.”

When someone goes looking for a home today, they are in most cases intercepted by a broker who has access to certain listings and who will work with the buyer at no cost upfront to help them get into a home.

But therein lies a common misconception, experts interviewed by NBC News said. Although a homeowner who puts their property up for sale must hire professionals to market their home, they usually fold that cost into the final price paid by the buyer.

“The buyer brings the entire purchase price to the table,” Letdin said. “And the seller gets to keep a little bit more of that after this ruling.”

As part of the new settlement, the buyer should now be fully apprised upfront about any potential fees or commissions they’ll ultimately have to pay.

That’s because the agreement requires that a buyer sign a formal contract with a broker laying out what services they’ll be receiving, and for how much.

Alternatively, a homebuyer could decide not to hire a broker and instead put their search costs toward a real estate lawyer, appraiser or someone else with knowledge of the housing market, experts say.

And a seller could even offer to cover the cost of the buyer’s team as an incentive to attract more buyers.

Of course, for a property that’s garnering a lot of attention, such buyer incentives are unlikely to be on the table.

And in the months following Covid-19 pandemic reopenings, the hottest U.S. real estate markets were tipped squarely in favor of sellers.

But now, with home price growth leveling off, the playing field is leveling out too, putting more buyers in the driver’s seat, experts say.

“Now you can hire an attorney for $1,500, instead of paying a $50,000 commission,” said Doug Miller, a real estate lawyer based in Minnesota who helped launch the actions that led to the NAR settlement.

Whomever a prospective buyer chooses as their representative in the homebuying process, the NAR settlement now formally bans the seller’s ability to advertise a commission for the buyer’s reps on the multiple listing service.

For its part, the NAR has maintained that the free market has always set commission levels, and that they were always negotiable — and even useful.

“Offers of compensation help make professional representation more accessible, decrease costs for home buyers to secure these services, increase fair housing opportunities, and increase the potential buyer pool for sellers,” the NAR said in its March 15 statement announcing the agreement.

But in most cases, there was little difference in the amount being offered for those commissions in a given market — usually about 3%.

That’s because any attempt to offer a lower commission to a buyer’s agent would likely motivate the agent to direct their client away from that property.

Miller characterized that behavior as improper and said buyers, in many cases, would have had no awareness of it.

“The future here is that buyers will now be in the driver’s seat,” Miller said. “Instead of that [commission] money going to their agent … it can now go directly to the buyer. It’s the same amount of money, but now the buyer gets money instead of a buyer agent, and they can decide what to do with it.”

What’s more, greater competition for clients is likely to result in lower costs across the board, said Ryan Tomasello, a real estate industry analyst with the Keefe, Bruyette & Woods financial firm.

“When you introduce a ton of transparency to a marketplace that has historically lacked it, any economist will tell you that reduces friction costs — i.e., commissions — and those are some of the highest in the world,” Tomasello said. “So the all-in cost of buying and selling a home, in theory, is going to decline.”

Many experts, including other real estate professionals, agree that the settlement will effectively thin the ranks of fly-by-night agents who served as an intermediary — a phenomenon that surged during the pandemic-era housing boom.

“A lot of folks parachuted in during 2020-2021 to try to make easy extra money by putting themselves out there as a buyer agent and taking 3%,” said Phil Crescenzo Jr., vice president of the Southeast division at Nation One Mortgage Corp.

“But they weren’t bringing 3% of value — not even close.”

Crescenzo compared it to moonlighting mortgage brokers who helped fuel the housing bubble of the mid-to-late 2000s.

“Once they changed the compensation rules, the dominant professionals rose to the top, the bottom disappeared, and the industry got better,” Crescenzo said.

The parent company of Chrysler and Dodge is recalling a total of 318,000 vehicles over air bag parts that can potentially shatter and cause injury.

The parent, Stellantis, said in documents posted on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website that affected vehicles’ side air bag inflators can explode and hurl shrapnel inside the vehicle.

The recall affects Dodge Charger and Chrysler 300 vehicles from the 2018 through 2021 model years.

Stellantis said it had received no reports of injuries.

Dealers have been instructed to replace the faulty parts free of charge.

Three senior Boeing executives including its CEO are stepping down, the company said Monday, as the company continues to deal with an ongoing scandal and federal investigation into the safety of its passenger jets.

CEO Dave Calhoun confirmed he was leaving the company by the end of the year in a statement. Stan Deal, the CEO and president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, has retired effective immediately. Larry Kellner, chair of the company’s board of directors, will not stand for re-election at the next shareholders’ annual meeting. Boeing board member and former Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf will succeed Kellner.

The company has been mired in a slew of negative stories since a door panel blew out on a Boeing 737 Max plane flown by Alaska Airlines in January. The fallout from that fateful flight shows no sign of stopping: The FBI informed passengers last week that they may have been the victims of a crime that the bureau is still investigating.

Despite Boeing announcing a range of measures to improve safety and committing to working with federal investigators, some passengers have spoken of feeling nervous climbing on board its aircraft.

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Jan. 25, 2024.Aaron Schwartz / NurPhoto via Getty Images file

In a letter to staff, posted on the Boeing website, Calhoun acknowledged that the Alaska Airlines incident had changed the company.

‘As you all know, the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 accident was a watershed moment for Boeing,’ he wrote. ‘We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We also must inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company.’

‘The eyes of the world are on us,’ he said, referring to ongoing efforts to reassure both the company’s airline customers and the flying public that its aircraft are safe.

In an interview with CNBC following Monday’s announcement, Calhoun acknowledged the ongoing challenges at Boeing.

‘We have this bad habit in our company,’ he said, adding production pressures continued to weigh on performance. ‘When you move it down the line, it sends a message to your own people that ‘Wow, I guess the movement of the airplane is more important than the first time quality of the product.’ And we have got to get that in way more balanced. Without a doubt.’ 

Calhoun said in the letter to employees that the company had over the last five years faced “some of the most significant challenges our company and industry have ever faced in our 108-year history.”

Calhoun was appointed CEO in 2020 in the wake of two other air disasters that some experts blamed on failures at Boeing. The crashes of Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines in 2018 and 2019, which killed a total of 346 people, both involved the failure of a Boeing software system known as MCAS.

In an interview with the New York Times upon his appointment, Calhoun, who had served on the board of Boeing since 2009 and was appointed non-executive chairman in 2019, promised to change the internal culture at Boeing.

“It’s more than I imagined it would be, honestly,” Calhoun said at the time, describing the problems he was confronting at the plane manufacturer. “And it speaks to the weaknesses of our leadership.”

Yet in the same interview, he seemed to imply that American pilots would not have reacted to the MCAS system failures as the foreign-born ones did.

In the wake of the second crash in March 2019, the 737 Max was grounded worldwide and not re-approved for flight for nearly two years.

In 2021, Boeing agreed to pay a $2.5 billion penalty to settle criminal charges over accusations it concealed information about its 737 Max airplane, with Boeing admitting it had ‘deceived’ the FAA about the MCAS system’s reliability.

Calhoun said at the time that the settlement ‘appropriately acknowledges how we fell short of our values and expectations.’

In an interview last week, Michael Whitaker, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, told NBC News that Boeing had no choice but to develop a plan to improve its culture and practices to meet the agency’s safety standards.

Whitaker said Boeing’s priorities “have been on production and not on safety and quality.”

In the wake of the January Alaska Airlines incident, some Wall Street analysts said more drastic change was needed.

“How many times can ‘won’t happen again’ happen again?” Bank of America Corp. analyst Ronald Epstein wrote in a report in January.

“Both Boeing and [Boeing parts supplier] Spirit [AeroSystems] need a drastic cultural overhaul. This cultural change won’t come from FAA mandates, congressional hearings, internal memos, or one-hour all hands meetings. For culture to move from corporate jargon to being embodied in the habits and minds of both workforces, we see it as necessary for Boeing and Spirit to drastically rethink the ways they have operated.”