Before the NAR settlement, Americans searched for buyer agency or buyer broker agreements about 2,376 times a month. In the latest 12 months, with written buyer agreements now required, it's 4,867. Searches about commissions spiked 14.8x in March 2024, then settled 20% below where they started.
Stagingmate ResearchMonthly Google search volumes summed per period. State figures are per 10,000 homes-for-sale searches in the same state and period, to adjust for market size. The weekly timing of the commission spike comes from Google Trends, pulled twice and averaged.
Google reports rounded monthly search volumes, and very small volumes show as 10 or nothing, so small states and rare queries are noisy. Google may group close variants of a query. Search volume measures interest, not transactions. Searches come from agents as well as consumers. This shows interest in the new rules, not how commissions changed.
change in US searches for buyer agency and buyer broker agreements, Oct 2022–Jul 2023 vs Sep 2025–Aug 2026.
commission and fee searches in March 2024, vs the pre-settlement monthly average.
states with enough search volume where buyer-agreement searches rose.
Buyer agency and buyer broker agreement searches per 10,000 homes-for-sale searches, Sep 2025 to Aug 2026. 30 states with enough volume to measure; the rest are left blank.
| New Mexico | 133.5 | 30.6 | 336 | 506.3 | 259 |
| Arkansas | 101.2 | 31.6 | 221 | 439.4 | 221.3 |
| Oklahoma | 99.4 | 25.9 | 283 | 446.5 | 173.5 |
| Arizona | 88.9 | 27.3 | 226 | 511.9 | 140.7 |
| Florida | 86.6 | 26.8 | 223 | 501.5 | 124.2 |
| Texas | 82.6 | 40.4 | 104 | 422.2 | 116.5 |
| Louisiana | 75 | 27.9 | 169 | 425.2 | 158 |
| New Jersey | 71.7 | 15.8 | 355 | 641.2 | 174.4 |
| Missouri | 66 | 23.8 | 177 | 374.2 | 132.1 |
| Virginia | 62.6 | 28.2 | 122 | 519.1 | 143.3 |
| Georgia | 61.2 | 33.3 | 84 | 606.4 | 201.4 |
| Indiana | 60 | 12.2 | 393 | 265.2 | 101.1 |
| Oregon | 59.7 | 17.1 | 248 | 459.6 | 142.7 |
| Washington | 59.6 | 23.2 | 158 | 493.2 | 150.9 |
| Iowa | 57 | 17.6 | 224 | 364 | 113.2 |
| Kentucky | 55.2 | 17.8 | 211 | 352.5 | 162.7 |
| Illinois | 55.1 | 15 | 267 | 344.1 | 95.1 |
| Wisconsin | 54.3 | 28.1 | 94 | 284.1 | 98.6 |
| Tennessee | 53.8 | 21.4 | 151 | 438.6 | 150 |
| Colorado | 53.6 | 25.5 | 110 | 706 | 206.9 |
| South Carolina | 52.1 | 30.5 | 71 | 718.4 | 359 |
| New York | 50.9 | 28.4 | 80 | 442.5 | 133.3 |
| California | 48.4 | 18.8 | 158 | 457.5 | 102.9 |
| Maryland | 46.9 | 30.3 | 55 | 500.2 | 162.9 |
| Ohio | 46.8 | 9.5 | 392 | 278.5 | 95.2 |
| North Carolina | 41.3 | 15.9 | 159 | 665.6 | 360.2 |
| Massachusetts | 38.7 | 16.4 | 136 | 519.7 | 135.3 |
| Pennsylvania | 35.5 | 14.1 | 152 | 360.8 | 109.6 |
| Michigan | 32.1 | 11.4 | 181 | 303.6 | 90.8 |
| Minnesota | 29.1 | 13.9 | 110 | 356.1 | 105.5 |
commission and fee searches in March 2024 compared with a normal month before the settlement.
The settlement news broke in March 2024, and searches about commissions jumped overnight. When the new rules took effect in August 2024, attention moved to the buyer agreements every MLS buyer now has to sign before touring homes. That interest has stayed roughly double its old level.
| State | Agreement searches per 10k home searches | Change since 2022–23 |
|---|---|---|
| New Mexico | 133.5 | +336% |
| Arkansas | 101.2 | +221% |
| Oklahoma | 99.4 | +283% |
| Arizona | 88.9 | +226% |
| Florida | 86.6 | +223% |
| Texas | 82.6 | +104% |
| Louisiana | 75 | +169% |
| New Jersey | 71.7 | +355% |
| Missouri | 66 | +177% |
| Virginia | 62.6 | +122% |
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Stagingmate Research (2026). Searches for buyer agreements are up 105% since the NAR settlement. https://stagingmate.com/research/buyer-agent-commission-after-the-nar-settlement
Free to use under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. For the full dataset or a local cut, email press@stagingmate.com.
Yes. Searches for buyer agreements are up 105% on pre-settlement levels, while commission searches spiked and then fell back.