Admin Fees: Counsel Offers HUD Views

HUD General Counsel Helen Kanovski says in a letter that the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act doesn't prescribe how brokers who use them are to set their administrative fees--they can be percentage-based or flat or a combination of both--but they must be disclosed on line 700 of the HUD-1. The letter responds to an NAR inquiry and provides the latest HUD thinking on handling the fees (sometimes called transaction fees, among other things). RESPA attorney Phil Schulman in an article gives his thoughts on disclosing the fees