More here on some of the workarounds the industry has used to keep commissions in place: www.mercurynews.com/2025/09/21/r...

“There’s a convention that’s been in place for a long time,” one home seller told me. “The more you try to buck against that standard, the more potential problems you create for yourself.”

But one year later — home sellers and buyers are largely paying the same fees as before. Some feel they've been pressured into it by the industry, worried that if they don't pay the usual fees, they could lose out on a sale.

The standard fees for homesellers — 5% to 6%, split between the buyer's and seller's agents — was supposed to give way to a new era of separate negotiations, with the potential to reduce commissions for everybody.

The new report outlines several alternatives to the 171-mile segment between Merced and Bakersfield.

Notably, some of the alternative routes propose skipping Merced, home of the newest UC campus, and heading straight to Gilroy after Madera.

But California will have to decide if subsidizing this group brings enough benefits to justify the potential loss of taxes to the state. My previous reporting shows that mod-income housing sometimes doesn't provide much of a difference from market-rate: www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/18/m...

Neither passed, but these ideas are likely to come back to the legislature in some way (both bills have appeared in previous sessions.) Developers say that they can't build for this income level w/o subsidies.

Two solutions to subsidize middle-income housing were put forth this year, with different goals:
- SB 336/@scottwiener.bsky.social, would have extended the welfare prop. tax exemption to mod-income rentals
- AB 595/Juan Carrillo, would have created a new tax credit for mod-income home builders