The new rules prohibit companies from paying referral fees to any employee who directly deals with consumers and who performs a settlement service - like a loan officer - on behalf of consumers. The Bush administration's rules, by contrast, permitted front-line employees to be paid for such referrals.

Real-estate sales associates, who are independent contractors, not employees of their realty firms, never have been allowed to receive referral fees for directing clients to mortgage, title or other affiliated settlement providers.

But under the new regulations, "managerial" employees - branch managers or executives who only rarely deal directly with individual home buyers - can receive bonuses or other payments based on the overall "capture rate" or volume of business sent by their offices to affiliated settlement-service firms.

"The goal," said Sarah Rosen, a HUD official who helped draft the rule, "is not to put roadblocks in front of (affiliated realty-service arrangements), but to put the focus back on the consumer's best interests. We want to make sure that employees who are in a direct position of trust with the consumer will not have undue incentives to steer" them to affiliates, rather than encouraging them to shop around.

Large real-estate firms with multiservice subsidiaries and affiliates generally think HUD's new approach is too heavy-handed and intrusive on the issue. Ron Maas, general counsel to New Jersey-based Weichert Realtors, the country's highest-volume independent home-realty-brokerage company, argues that as long as consumers are alerted that business affiliations exist, "they are smart enough to know how to shop, and most of them in fact choose to do so."

Maas' firm owns a mortgage subsidiary, a title company and an insurance affiliate - some or all of whose services are offered as an option to home buyers. The home-mortgage subsidiary functions as a broker or mortgage banker for national and local lenders, according to Maas. Depending upon location, a home buyer might be able to choose among 20 to 25 competing mortgage lenders by going through the Weichert in-house loan program.

But the typical "capture rate" for mortgage financing in a branch office may be just 25 percent, says Maas. Three-fourths of customers, in other words, get home loans elsewhere - presumably after shopping independently. By trying to control which employees deal with the consumer on settlement services, Maas argues, "HUD is needlessly complicating" the real-estate business and "interfering with our ability to provide these services efficiently."

Not all big realty firms agree with Maas, however. Robert Rist, president of California-based Coldwell Banker Residential Affiliates, welcomes "the certainty that now we know what we can do and what we can't" in offering settlement services to consumers.

The upshot of all this for home buyers? Look for more - not less - "one-stop shopping" in the coming months. And look for a new wrinkle in disclosures: Under the new rules, you're not only going to get a disclosure form, but you're going to be asked to sign it as well, so everybody knows that you know who is partnering with whom.

(Copyright, 1996, Washington Post Writers Group)