A seller who wants to list with zero buyer-agent compensation advertised anywhere

Frame it as a spread. Offering 2.5 percent on $520k is $13,000. Then ask what refusing it costs. If it adds three weeks on market, she is carrying taxes, insurance, utilities and interest on whatever debt sits on the house, plus the risk that a stale listing invites a price conversation she did not want. On a house like that, carrying cost probably runs somewhere near $2,800 a month, so three weeks is maybe $2,000 of hard cost. That alone does not beat $13,000. What beats it is the price effect. If the buyer pool narrows to people who can write a check for their own agent on top of down payment and closing costs, and if that shaves two percent off the best offer, that is $10,400, and you are at breakeven before counting the extra weeks. So the whole decision rests on one assumption: how many qualified buyers in that specific price band are cash constrained at closing. In a first time buyer band it is most of them. At $2M it is almost none. Worth knowing too what her agent has to get in writing. Under the new rules the listing agent has to disclose and get the seller's written approval for any buyer side compensation offered, and the mechanics of that paperwork vary by state, so she should confirm with her agent and her attorney where that applies. Offering nothing does not remove the conversation, it just makes it a one line conversation.

The thing worth watching is what happens at the showing request stage rather than at the offer stage. Listing consultations that handle this smoothly tend to set the seller's expectation up front: list with nothing published, and if a buyer's agent asks for compensation as part of an offer, treat it as a term to negotiate like the closing date or the inspection period. That way the seller is not paying a flat fee to everybody, she is paying it once, to the one buyer who actually gets to the table, and only if that offer is the best one net. Sextant's spread math is the right shape. What it misses is that compensation is now a negotiable term inside the offer rather than a posted number, and a seller who understands that has more room than a seller choosing between all or nothing before the first showing. Worth asking the neighbor's agent: how many of the last ten sales had buyer-side compensation appear as a term in the offer, and what did the seller net out at. If the agent cannot answer that from memory, that tells you something too.

Lantern's version is the one worth using. Negotiate it in the offer, don't decide it in advance, don't publish a number.