For New York Homeowners, Selling Your Home Just Got a Lot Less Expensive

Written by:

Steve Marcinuk

Date:

16 May 2026

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For most homeowners, selling a property is the largest financial transaction of their lives, yet the process has remained largely unchanged for decades, including the fees. That’s beginning to shift. A confluence of legal, technological, and market forces is giving sellers new options that simply didn’t exist before, and platforms like Locqube, co-founded by CEO Manuel Pantiga, are among the first to operate squarely inside that opening.

At the center of that shift is a deceptively simple question: where does the money actually go? The typical U.S. commission at the start of 2026 sits at 5.7%, a figure that can quietly erase tens of thousands of dollars in equity at the closing table on a single transaction. For New York homeowners in particular, where property values run high, that cost isn’t abstract. It’s the difference between walking away with what you built and leaving a significant portion of it behind.

The Math Nobody Shows You

When a homeowner lists a property, the focus naturally falls on the asking price: what the market will bear, what the neighbors sold for, what the appraisal says. What gets less attention is the slice taken out before that number ever reaches the seller’s pocket. On a $700,000 home, that commission doesn’t just trim the margin; it quietly dismantles equity that took years to build. For most sellers, that figure is presented as standard, expected, and largely non-negotiable.

The reality is that it never had to be that way. The commission structure that dominates American real estate wasn’t the result of regulation or consumer demand. It was an industry convention that persisted because sellers lacked both the tools and the structural freedom to challenge it. Technology had already disrupted nearly every other major consumer transaction: how people book travel, order food, hail a ride, and shop for almost anything. Home selling remained the exception, until now. What’s changed isn’t just the technology. It’s the leverage sellers finally have to use it.

What the Rules Just Changed

For years, the commission question wasn’t just cultural; it was structural. When a home was listed, the seller was effectively required to commit upfront to compensating not only their own agent but the buyer’s agent as well. That arrangement meant sellers were financing representation on both sides of a negotiation, including the side working against their interests. Many objected. Few had a practical alternative. The 2024 National Association of Realtors settlement changed that by removing the requirement for listing brokers to make a blanket offer of buyer-agent compensation, a quiet but consequential shift that cracked open the door for a different kind of transaction.

What that ruling did, in practical terms, was reduce the friction for alternative models to operate. Sellers no longer had to enter a listing agreement pre-committed to a fee arrangement they had long questioned. The settlement didn’t create the appetite for change, as that had been building for years, but it did remove a structural barrier that had kept alternative models at the margins. The timing, combined with what AI now makes possible at the transaction level, meant that the window for a genuinely different home-selling experience had finally opened.

Control Without the Commission

The practical question for any seller isn’t whether the industry is changing. It’s what that change actually looks like at the moment an offer lands. For most of recent history, that moment belonged almost entirely to the agent: they received the offer, filtered the information, and brought a summary to the seller. The emerging model flips that dynamic. Sellers now have platforms that deliver offers directly, with real-time visibility into showings, competitive listings, and market data, without waiting for someone else to decide what’s worth sharing.

The real-world implications go beyond convenience. One seller managed the sale of her father’s home remotely while he was in end-of-life care, making pricing and offer decisions from Florida without ever needing to be physically present. The platform gave her a live view of showing activity, market comparisons, and incoming offers, enough information to act confidently in a situation where both the financial and emotional stakes were unusually high. That scenario isn’t an edge case. It reflects what sellers increasingly need: not just a lower fee, but a process that treats them as capable of making their own decisions when given the right information.

A Faster Horse Won’t Do

There is a version of this story where the industry responds by making incremental adjustments: slightly lower fees, marginally better communication, a few more tools bolted onto an otherwise unchanged process. Some traditional brokerages are already moving in that direction. But the sellers driving this shift aren’t asking for a more attentive version of the old model. They’re asking for something it was never designed to provide: direct access, transparent data, and pricing that reflects what technology now makes possible. Incremental isn’t the same as different.

The gap between what sellers have historically accepted and what they can now access is widening quickly, and awareness is catching up. For New York homeowners in particular, where transaction values amplify every percentage point, the math of a lower-fee sale is difficult to ignore once it’s been laid out plainly. The tools exist. The legal landscape has shifted. The remaining variable is whether sellers know they have options. Increasingly, they do.

About the Expert: Manuel Pantiga is the Co-Founder and CEO of Locqube, an AI-powered home-selling platform operating in New York and Connecticut. He had more than two decades of real estate experience before co-founding the company.

This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.