Flat Fee MLS - a revolution in the making?
The concept of flat fee real estate services has probably been around a pretty long time, and so you’re probably wondering - what’s the big deal???
Historically the reason for the need of real estate agents was similar to the need for stock brokers - in order to have a market with some degree of liquidity, there needed to be a group of highly specialized people that pooled together the available information to both participate in and actively create the market. However, in modern times this pool of paper and indiviudal communication has largely been replaced by computer databases.
The result of this in the financial industry, for example, is that the old fashioned stock broker who took a sizable commission in order to merely execute your stock transaction via a computer interface, has been largely replaced by online trading services.
This is not to say that there were not certain stock brokers who truly added value by providing good advice, and I think it’s fairly safe to say that these same individuals who did offer good advice have adapted to the growing industry of financial consultants to continue doing what they were previously doing.
What this means, at least in the case study of the financial industry, is that if a person who was formerly a stock broker could provide truly valuable financial advice, then they could probably continue to make lots of money by charging high hourly rates for their services, similar to lawyer, doctors, and accountants. However, for the many people who were previously able to charge high rates without adding value, they have had to face finding alternative employment.
I think a similar shakeout is going to happen in the real esate industry as the growth in online information services provides consumers with increasing amounts of knowledge previously only available to real estate agents. These newly educated consumers are going to ask themselves, why should a real estate agent get thousands of dollars for entering my house into a database???
And so they will turn to the growing cadre of brokers offering flat fee MLS services, and so the revolution begins.
[tags] flat fee MLS, flat fee mls [/tags]