States with minimum-service rules for real estate sales
By Holden Lewis • Bankrate.com

The movement to impose minimum-service requirements on real estate brokers began in 2004, when Florida and Illinois enacted laws. The campaign accelerated in 2005, when six other states passed laws. It has continued this year, with Indiana and New Mexico adopting new standards.

The measures captured the attention of federal antitrust lawyers, who in 2005 warned half a dozen states that the bills they were considering were anti-competitive. Of those six states -- Alabama, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas -- all but Michigan adopted the requirements anyway.

New Mexico was the most recent state to snub the Justice Department.

In November, the DOJ wrote to the state's real estate commission that a proposed minimum-services regulation "would replace customer choice with a regulatory requirement mandating that a broker provide a 'one size fits all' package of services to the customer, whether or not the customer wants to purchase all of them."

The letter cited the aftermath of the similar Texas law: "Afterwards, some Texas brokers who had provided discount real estate services raised their prices and attributed the increase directly to the new law."

Three months later, in February, New Mexico's real estate commission adopted the regulation -- during a meeting in a broker's private office in Las Cruces, 220 miles south of the commission's headquarters in Albuquerque.

States with limited service laws and regulations