Increasing Competition in the Real Estate Industry

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_10_14-2007_10_20.shtml#1192638761

The DOJ has set up a new website that describes all of the anticompetitive legislative and regulatory barriers in the residential real estate market that raise the price of real estate services and reduce consumer choice. There is lots of informative and good stuff there. My FTC colleague Luke Froeb has more.

One area in which we regrettably fell short was for reform of closing costs by permitting "bundling" of all closing costs into a binding estimate for all the costs, soup to nuts. This would have permitted to consumers to shop for all costs at one as a package, rather than the current required HUD-1 process where all the costs are itemized instead. One story that describes the HUD proposal and its demise is here.