For a lot of people buying or selling a home may be the biggest financial decision they'll ever make,

and it can be a complicated process.

Buyers need to think about down payments, interest rates, homeowners insurance.

It adds up to a significant chunk of change.

So we closed on the house three weeks ago.

The asking price was $390,000,

and we wound up paying $9 billion plus closing costs.

Okay, maybe not as much as in that SNL spoof of house hunting reality shows.

But one fee buyers usually don't have to pay is commissions for realtors.

So you know how it happens now is you sell a house, five to six percent comes off the top,

half goes to the seller's representative, half goes to the

buyers representative. Jill Schlesinger is a CBS News business analyst speaking

there with NPR's here and now. The Commission model has been a practice in real estate for more than a hundred years, but all that is about to change.

Right now, the sellers said, hey, why should we pay the buyers agent? Why's that coming out of my pocket?

Last year, a group of home sellers won a class action lawsuit against the real estate industry.

A federal jury found that agents had conspired to keep commissions artificially high.

So the National Association of Realtors has reached a settlement

that could mean home sellers will no longer foot the total bill

for agent commissions. The industry average is 6% of

sale price. Most industry analysts believe this will put downward pressure on

the commissions paid, may be lopping off about 30% of the $100 billion

consumers paying commissions every single year.

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