Over the past three years, the average commission rate has been creeping up from an all time low of 4.94% in 2020 to 5.32% in 2022, which is the highest it’s been since 2013.
RealTrends has been tracking this information since 1991. The information is pulled from earnings reports of the top public real estate companies along with proprietary data collected by RealTrends.
Variations in average commission rates are common, as you can see from the graph below. RealTrends tracks total gross commission which is now around 5.32%. While RealTrends doesn’t track commissions by side, they do track the transaction sides of commissions in total.
“I think one of the underreported factors that we first noticed back in 2020 was that the top-performing individual agents and teams were grabbing a rapidly increasing share of the market — a trend that continued in 2022,” said Steve Murray, a senior advisor for HW Media.
“If we were to look at the average commission rate for top agents and teams, we would find that it mirrors these results,” added Murray.
In 2021, RealTrends looked at the profit and loss statements of several hundred teams for the RealTrends Team Profitability Study. The teams in the survey averaged $3.33 million in gross commission revenues, have been in business for an average of 10.9 years and have an average of 13.9 agents and 4.5 employees.
“We know from this study that, in this small sample size, the teams were rapidly increasing market share, and with that data, we can opine that top agents and teams are less prone to discount their commission charges than the overall agent population,” said Murray.