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Key Takeaways Real estate is still one of the last fully bundled services left in a major industry, but the NAR settlement this spring is changing that, whether anyone intended that or not.
The industry keeps fighting over whether agents will survive technology, but that’s the wrong question to ask. The real question is what level of service each consumer needs for their specific deal.
For about two decades, the real estate industry has talked about itself like it’s in the middle of a war. Agents vs. technology. Full commission vs. flat fee. For-sale-by-owner (FSBO) vs. full service. Every few years, a new headline declares that agents are about to go extinct, technology is about to make the profession obsolete and the old model is finally cracking. None of that has actually happened, and there’s a pretty obvious reason why. Consumers were never asking the question the industry kept arguing about.
Nobody wakes up wondering whether real estate agents should exist as a category. They wake up wondering how much help they actually need for the specific situation in front of them. That’s a completely different question, and it’s the one the industry has mostly ignored while it kept refighting the same fight.
Here’s the part that should embarrass everyone still arguing about FSBO. It’s at an all time low.
Last year, 5% of home sales had no agent involved at all, down from over 20% in the ’80s, and 91% of sellers used an agent. If the future of real estate were really about consumers ditching agents entirely, the data would show some version of that happening. It shows the opposite. People are not rejecting professional help. What’s actually shifting is something quieter and more interesting: how much help, and which parts of it, people want to pay for.
Real estate is finally catching up to everyone else
Real estate is still one of the last fully bundled services left in a major industry. When you hire an agent, you’re typically buying a pricing strategy, MLS access, negotiation, marketing, paperwork and advice as one inseparable package, whether you need all of it or not.
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