Excerpts from Marke****ch -

This week, the US Dept of Justice filed suit against the National
Association of Realtors, saying the trade group's policy regarding the
online use of home sale listings from its MLS database is
anti-competitive.

Realtors think they own the data about your house. And they have
jealously guarded that "ownership," which was a lot easier to do
before the Internet age.

In this new world, real estate agents do not distinguish themselves
because they have exclusive access to listings data. They create value
by providing a wide array of services and analysis - not information
that consumers can get themselves.

It's not hard to imagine the day when there is one giant public
database of all the housing stock in the US that contains all the
information about a property that you would expect to find on a
standard listing sheet. All you would have to do if you wanted to sell
is set an alert on your file, and any for-sale searches would turn up
your house.

Who would own that data? Like any public record, we all would.

Would we still need a million realtors then? That may be the real
issue in this debate.

Steve wrote:

Would we still need a million realtors then? That may be the real
issue in this debate.

One good thing about the large quantity of realtors is that it is
creating a lot of downward pressure on commissions. You can sell a
million dollar house for around $10,000 in commission now, where as in
the past some people paid as much as 6%, and the average was somewhere
between 4% and 5%.

There is one real estate company in Silicon Valley that has taken out
these bizarre advertisements, claiming that they get more money for your
house than discount real estate companies, and the difference is more
than what you save in commission from a lower cost real estate company.
However their data is highly flawed, and they actually admit as much in
the fine print, which I assume that they hope no one reads.

In H-town Texas, it has been 3% for a while now. However, most of my
realtor friends give back some money(commission) to their customers in
order to get their business. One of my realtor friends is only charging
1%. He is counting on doing volume.