Competition in the Real Estate Brokerage Industry - #10

The report states that the internet has placed more information into the hands of consumers and has "facilitated the growth of nontraditional business models."

One commenter from the American Bankers Association stated: “With individuals assuming more of the responsibility to gather and assess information, less time and effort is required by real estate agents in assessing market conditions (for sellers) and in identifying and showing houses [(for buyers)]. The cost of an agent’s service, therefore, should go down reflecting this shift in burden.". I certainly wish our esteemed banker would have given a percentage of overall transaction time that is saved by a broker so that we could assess how much to drop our prices. Though the comment has some merit, not many of us would presume to suggest that banking fees drop due to a new model of automated teller machine that uses less electricity to operate. Indeed, though the advent of automated tellers dropped their costs considerably, just use one not from your own bank and see what the charge is.

Here's another quote: "While the Internet clearly has had a significant impact on the real estate industry, one Workshop panelist, an economist, opined that the real estate brokerage industry has not experienced the types of technology gains benefiting consumers that have been seen in other service industries, such as making airline and other travel reservations and buying and selling stocks." While there should be more implementation of technology and the internet for efficiency in real estate, this statement seems to compare buying a plane ticket to buying the Boeing 747 itself. Since I'm not going to pay individually to have the plane inspected pre-flight, I do assume that my ticket cost includes that rather important function. We'll not even get into the purchase agreement terms and conditions for my acquisition of the aircraft. Then we can look at the differences in booking a hotel room and buying the hotel....or maybe not.

Entire series: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, #15, #16, #17, #18, #19 & final