The housing market is hot, hot, hot right now as home prices continue to soar in many markets to their highest prices ever. Since it doesn’t cost a real estate agent 10 times as much to sell a $1 million home as a $100,000 home, one would expect that the percentage fees for real estate agents would be falling. They aren’t. Why?

I started investigating the fees charged by the realtor industry some 15 years ago when I was an economics writer for the Wall Street Journal. I discovered that the real estate agents had created a de facto legal cartel that often rips off buyers and sellers of homes. The excess cost to home buyers and sellers from this industry cartel is typically in the tens of thousands of dollars for homes with a price above $500,000. For the economy as a whole, the real estate agent rules cost the economy more than $100 billion a year, and the scam continues to this day.