Real-estate agents are going extinct just like travel agents did [View all]

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https://fortune.com/2024/03/23/what-will-happen-to-real-etate-agents-housing-market-nar-settlement/

https://archive.ph/lpjZ1

Real-estate agents are going extinct just like travel agents did, award-winning professor says. ‘You just don’t need’ them anymore because of the internet
BY Sydney Lake
March 23, 2024, 9:00 AM UTC

Last week, the National Association of Realtors, one of the country’s largest industry associations, reached a groundbreaking $418 million settlement over an alleged conspiracy to inflate realtors’ commissions. Some have said the settlement signals an end to real-estate agents as we know them. But an award-winning finance professor, specialized in housing economics, says the demise of this particular profession has been coming for a while.

Indeed, Andrew C. Spieler, a distinguished professor in business and finance at Hofstra University, likens real estate agents to travel agents. Like travel agents, realtors were once the “gatekeepers” of information. They had access to MLS listings that consumers couldn’t find on their own, so buyers had to be much more “dependent” on their agents to even start house hunting, Spieler tells Fortune.

“You just don’t need them,” he says in regard to both travel agents and real estate agents. “I mean, there’s still a few out there, but it’s going to compress the industry.” Spieler is an award-winning academic who has won several industry awards for his real-estate research.

It’s not rocket science, he says. It’s the internet. Online, homebuyers have access to nearly all the information they’d need to purchase a home. On websites like Zillow and Realtor.com, consumers get almost all of the details they’d want to know, plus photos of the property.

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