PAR Legal Hotline 2025 Year in Review (and Some Helpful Hints)

The PAR Legal Hotline handled about 5,600 tickets in 2025, each representing a unique question from a PAR member. That’s a decrease of about 400 tickets from 2024, averaging out to about 23 calls per day.  

The good news, such as it is, is that this is the closest we’ve come to some semblance of a “normal” year since the hotline was moved in-house back in July of 2019. We managed to avoid any worldwide pandemics and national legal settlements in 2025, and the market in many areas seemed to nudge ever so slightly back towards a more balanced footing. So that was nice.  

Hotline attorneys label tickets with the standard forms and/or legal categories that are covered in the calls (e.g., fees, inspections, agency). So while the call volume was down, it’s clear that 2025 calls were definitely still affected by recent trends, including the 2024 NAR settlement and the ongoing market shifts.  

Top Topics 

Since we started keeping records in mid-2019, the most common topic – by far – has been landlord/tenant and property management issues. But the two most common topics in 2025 were brokerage fees and what we call “general form use,” with landlord-tenant falling to third place. These were clearly influenced by the ongoing practice adjustments required by the implementation of the NAR settlement in 2024, with lots of questions around things like how to fill out the listing and buyer agency forms to reflect the fees brokers were charging to clients, and how to properly discuss and negotiate broker-to-broker compensation or seller concessions for buyer broker fees. 

Helpful hint: Read the Guidelines for Preparation and Use for Forms XLS, BAC, NBA, CBC and ASR for information about how to correctly utilize these forms to negotiate and record fees. 

The “general form use” category also covered a lot of questions around contingencies that haven’t gotten a lot of action over the past several years, including issues around inspections, appraisal and sale and settlement contingencies. Many of those questions were asked by agents who have been in the business for three to four years or less (so they’ve never really dealt with those contingencies), or by more experienced agents who admitted that they may have forgotten what they knew about those forms. An unfortunate number of them were something like, “Here’s what we did, but now I’m thinking that might not have been right.” That’s not good. 

Helpful hint: Read all your forms and guidelines (and talk to your broker/manager) before you talk with your client, and certainly before you start writing things up. Misusing a form or incorrectly explaining a contingency doesn’t just put the client at risk, it puts you and the brokerage at risk if the client were to file a complaint or lawsuit suggesting that you provided incorrect advice.  

There were also increases in questions around contract termination (up from no. 10 to no. 7 this year) and the return of escrow funds (not in the top 10 last year, but no. 8 this year). These questions seem to reflect market conditions in which buyers appear more willing to walk away from transactions for non-contractual reasons (e.g., they got cold feet after seeing what their mortgage payment would actually be), and in which sellers were more likely to fight for deposits because they were concerned about not finding an immediate replacement for those buyers. 

Helpful hint: Before calling the hotline, take a look at this JustListed article that walks you through the steps for dealing with a disputed deposit, as it answers many of the most common questions. For that matter, it’s a good idea to check out JustListed before calling for any questions, since many legal articles are written to directly address common Hotline scenarios. 

Top Callers 

There were 2,791 individual callers who contacted the Legal Hotline this year. The top 10 overall callers – our most “frequent fliers” – each called 20 times or more. All but one were brokers or managers who generally called on behalf of their agents. At the other end of the spectrum, 1,788 callers contacted the hotline only once. Many of them were first-time callers. 

Helpful hint: Talk. To. Your. Broker (or manager). First. PLEASE! And when you call in, it’s super helpful to lead with something like, “I’ve already talked to my broker, and here’s what they had to say.”  

Broker hint: Tell your agents to contact you or your management team first. Management can often address many of the more common questions without needing a hotline call, and for complicated issues, it’s usually better that you are looped in as soon as possible. Or to put that another way, please do not “manage by hotline” and tell agents to just call PAR with every question. It’s often not a good use of the agent’s time (or the hotline’s time) to deal with the simpler questions that way, and there’s some additional legal risk to a broker if it appears they are not taking their supervisory responsibilities seriously.  

Bonus Hints 

• We shield the hotline number online to reduce calls from consumers and non-members looking for free legal advice. If you need it, please contact the PAR Solutions Center at 800-555-3390, and they’ll provide it after validating membership.  
  • The PAR Legal Hotline is a member-only benefit, so please don’t pass the number on to clients or non-Realtors®. 
• Responses will often be delayed if you try to ask a hotline question some other way (like just leaving it on the Solutions Center voicemail, sending it through the website or emailing directly to one of the attorneys) and/or your message doesn’t have all the necessary information (name spelled out, phone number, brief summary of the substance of the question).  
• Please respect the boundaries of the Legal Hotline service.  
  • Our role is to provide assistance with members’ licensed real estate activities, not advise on your personal transactions. We may be able to provide limited information in transactions where you are the buyer/seller/landlord/tenant, but our best advice is to consider hiring a local real estate attorney – just as you’d advise your own clients to do. 
  • Hotline attorneys can’t interpret language that wasn’t drafted by PAR, no matter how the question is framed. If you’re dealing with a dispute over a form or clause drafted by agents, brokers, parties or an attorney, the parties will need private counsel.  
• Finally, our standard disclaimer is that hotline attorneys provide general information on relevant legal, regulatory, ethics, forms and related issues, but we do not provide specific legal advice on individual transactions. Sure, we’ll need some transactional details to have a good conversation, but we’re only getting limited information from one side of the transaction, so our responses are necessarily limited.  
  • Members have cited hotline responses to support their positions in ethics and arbitration cases, mediations, state real estate commission prosecutions and court cases. Sometimes those citations have been misinterpretations of our responses, and other times it becomes clear that the hotline attorney didn’t have all the information during the call. So just stop it, please. That’s not what we’re doing here, and hotline attorneys will be more direct with this disclaimer in the future.