The Quiet Collusion Making Housing Even Less Affordable

Here's the part of this story nobody wants to sit with: the mechanism isn't some shadowy conspiracy in a back room, it's the ordinary architecture of the real estate business, functioning exactly as designed. Listing agents, buyer agents, and sellers all have an incentive to keep information asymmetric, because that asymmetry is where the commissions live. Call it collusion if you want the punchier word, but really it's just an industry that figured out decades ago that a confused buyer is a profitable buyer.

And that's the thing conservatives should be saying louder than anyone: this isn't a failure of markets, it's a failure of transparency within a market that's been allowed to calcify. We've spent years arguing that regulation strangles housing supply, and that's true on zoning and permitting. But there's a difference between dumb bureaucratic red tape and the kind of information-hoarding that lets insiders skim value off buyers who have no way to know what they don't know. One is government failing to get out of the way. The other is an industry failing to compete honestly, and the two get lumped together in coverage that would rather blame "the system" in the abstract than name who's actually benefiting.

Ordinary families are not struggling to buy a home because some bureaucrat somewhere added a form. They're struggling because rates are brutal, supply is thin, and now on top of that the very professionals they're paying to represent their interests have a business model built on them not knowing too much. Fixing zoning matters. Fixing rates matters. But if agents and brokerages are quietly steering deals to protect commissions rather than serve buyers, that's not red tape, that's a rigged table, and it deserves to be called that plainly instead of buried under vaguer complaints about "the market."