Do Maryland Sellers Still Pay the Buyer's Agent?
This is Part 13 of The Fort Washington Files from Donnell Williams Jr. and DMV Prime Properties, a thirty-part series built entirely on what 689 Fort Washington listings actually did in 2026.
Every listing appointment Donnell has taken in Fort Washington in the last year has produced some version of the same question. The seller has read that the rules changed, that sellers no longer have to pay the buyer's agent, and they want to know whether they should stop. It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one.
Here is the straight answer, and then here is the local data that actually bears on the decision.
Sellers were never required to pay it
Start with the piece that most coverage got wrong. A Maryland seller was never legally obligated to pay the agent representing the buyer. There was no statute requiring it and no rule making it automatic.
What existed was a widespread custom, reinforced by how listings were built and marketed, in which a seller commonly agreed to compensate the buyer's brokerage out of the proceeds of the sale. Custom is not law. It was always negotiable, and it always sat inside a contract between private parties.
So the honest framing of the current question is not "do sellers still have to." It is "do sellers still choose to, and what happens when they do or do not."
What actually changed
Two practical things changed, and they are worth separating.
The first is advertising. Compensation offered to a buyer's brokerage can no longer be advertised in the MLS. It is not that compensation disappeared. It is that the multiple listing service stopped being the place where it is published and discovered. Buyers and their agents now learn about it a different way, and the terms get worked out in the contract rather than being assumed from a field in a listing.
The second is representation. Buyers now sign written agreements with their own agents before touring homes. That agreement spells out what the buyer's agent is owed and by whom, before the buyer walks into a house.
The combined effect is that compensation moved from a default that sat in the background into a term that gets discussed openly. It is negotiable. It is set by contract. And Donnell is a broker rather than an attorney, so any Maryland seller weighing how to handle it in their own listing agreement or contract of sale should have those documents reviewed by a Maryland real estate attorney.
The argument that matters is not legal, it is local
A seller can spend a long time arguing about principle. The more productive question is what the decision does to the pool of buyers who can actually close on their house, and in Fort Washington that pool has a shape Donnell can show on paper.
Of the 361 closed Fort Washington sales in his Bright MLS export this year, here is how buyers paid:
- Conventional: 181 closings, median $470,000, 17 days on market, 40 percent sold below original list
- FHA: 78 closings, median $460,000, 26 days, 46 percent below original
- VA: 59 closings, median $550,000, 19 days, 46 percent below original
- Cash: 30 closings, median $330,000, 9 days, 63 percent below original
FHA and VA together were 137 of 361 closings. That is more than a third of everything that sold in this zip code this year.
Why those 137 closings are the center of the question
FHA and VA are the two loan types built around buyers who bring less to the closing table. That is the design of the programs, and it is the reason they exist.
A buyer using one of those programs is not typically sitting on a large reserve of uncommitted cash after the down payment and reserves are accounted for. Money that has to be produced at settlement, on top of everything else settlement requires, is the hardest money for that buyer to find. It is not a question of whether they want the house or whether they qualify for the loan. It is a question of liquidity on a specific day.
If a Fort Washington seller structures a listing in a way that shifts a new out-of-pocket obligation onto the buyer at closing, the buyers most affected are the ones in those two columns. Those columns contain 137 of the 361 sales that happened here this year.
The VA row is the one that surprises sellers
Look at the VA line again. Fifty-nine VA closings at a median sale price of $550,000, the highest median of any financing type in Fort Washington this year, well above the $470,000 zip code median and well above the $470,000 conventional median.
That single row undoes the assumption Donnell hears most often, which is that VA buyers are the weak offers. In this zip code, in 2026, VA buyers closed the highest prices, and they did it in a median of 19 days, faster than FHA at 26 and only two days slower than conventional at 17.
A seller who quietly deprioritizes VA offers in Fort Washington is deprioritizing the group that paid the most here this year. That is worth knowing before a strategy hardens.
The FHA row and the days on market it carries
The FHA line shows 78 closings at a median of $460,000 with a median of 26 days on market, the longest of the four financing types. Forty-six percent of them closed below original list.
Twenty-six days is not slow in absolute terms, but it is eight days longer than the 18-day median across all 361 Fort Washington closings, and it sits on the wrong side of a line this series has drawn repeatedly. Sales that closed in 15 to 30 days sold below original 42.6 percent of the time. Sales that closed in 31 to 60 days sold below original 72.5 percent of the time.
Anything that adds friction to an FHA buyer's path pushes them toward the second of those two rows, and that is where seller proceeds start to erode.
Where cash fits, and why it is not the answer
Some sellers hear all of this and conclude they should just hold out for cash. The cash column says otherwise.
Thirty cash closings in Fort Washington this year, a median sale price of $330,000, a median of 9 days on market, and 63 percent of them closing below original list. That is the smallest group, the lowest median price by a wide margin, and the highest share selling under asking.
Cash is fast. In this zip code this year, cash was also cheap. A seller optimizing for cash offers is optimizing for speed at a price, which is a legitimate choice for someone who needs speed and a poor one for someone who needs proceeds.
Set it against the failure rate
This decision does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in a market where 144 of the 505 Fort Washington listings that left the market this year did so without selling, a failure rate of 28.5 percent.
The failed group carried a median original list of $534,748 against $479,900 for the closed group, on homes that were actually larger, a median 1,952 square feet above grade versus 1,716. Half of them cut their price, median cut $25,000, and still did not sell. They were priced at $267 per square foot on original list against $273 for the closed group, so they were not overpriced per foot. They were priced at an absolute number the local buyer pool could not reach.
That is the theme of this entire series. Fort Washington's constraint is the reach of its buyer pool. Anything a seller does that narrows that pool further, in a zip code where more than a quarter of listings already fail, is a decision that should be made on purpose and with the numbers in front of them.
The rate environment does not make that easier. Freddie Mac's survey for the week ending September 17, 2026 put the 30-year fixed at 6.95 percent, up from 6.76 percent the prior week and up from 6.26 percent a year earlier. NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun noted on September 16, 2026 that rates had moved from 6 percent in late February to 7 percent that week, and called 7 percent the new normal.
How Donnell frames it with sellers
The framing that works is not "you have to" and it is not "never again." It is a business question with a numerator and a denominator.
It also helps to separate two things sellers tend to run together. One is whether a buyer is represented at all, which is now settled by a written agreement between that buyer and their own agent and is not the seller's call. The other is who pays for that representation and how, which is a term of the transaction like any other term of the transaction. The first is fixed. The second is open, and it is the only one a seller is actually deciding.
Every term in a listing either widens or narrows the set of buyers who can perform. In a zip code where 137 of 361 closings ran on FHA or VA financing, and where 115 active listings are competing at a median list price of $499,900 with 50 percent of them already having cut and 42 percent past 60 days on market, narrowing that set has a cost that shows up in days and in dollars.
What the terms should be in any particular transaction depends on the house, the price band, the condition, and the seller's own priorities. They are negotiable, they are set by contract, and they should be decided listing by listing rather than by a blanket policy read off a headline.
Talk it through before you list
A Fort Washington seller deciding how to handle buyer agent compensation should make that call with their own numbers, their own price band, and their own timeline on the table, not from a rule of thumb. Donnell Williams Jr. is the broker-owner of DMV Prime Properties at 12815 Old Fort Road in Fort Washington, and he will lay out what the choice does to the buyer pool for a specific house in a specific band, then send the paperwork to the seller's attorney for review. He is a broker, not an attorney, and that review is worth having. Call 301.818.0313 or email donnell@dmvprimerealty.com to go through it before the listing goes live.
Part 14 of The Fort Washington Files covers the 2026 Maryland rules a seller here should know, from the Homestead Tax Credit to the deferred water and sewer disclosure obligation.
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