Debra Kamin:

You’re absolutely right, that, for first-time homebuyers, it is often very difficult to scrape together just the money you need to be able to get that down payment to buy that first home, especially now, when the housing market is so tight and so expensive.

And in the past, one thing that homebuyers did not have to worry about was paying their real estate agents. So, as this settlement has its effects, one of the things we might see is that homebuyers now feel, oh, gosh, I also have to pay my real estate agent on top of everything.

But, most likely, what’s also going to happen is we’re going to see new models for compensation evolve out of this that didn’t exist before, where the way that we pay real estate agents, particularly on the buy side, might be completely different. It could be a flat fee. It could be by the hour. There’s all sorts of ways to pay agents that never existed before because there wasn’t a competition in the market that allowed those new methods to be introduced.