I have to say good riddance to IPayOne. I have been defiant and refused to call the Sports Arena the “I Pay One” center. Mainly because I knew they wouldn’t last. I’m not at all against other business models in real estate and believe as a whole, they make the whole system better and stronger. However, IPayOne.com was founded by a bunch of crooks and thumbed their noses at a lot of good people along the way.

I’ve been doing online marketing for the real estate industry for several years now and can confidently say that most people don’t truly understand how the whole real estate universe is put together (I’m quite positive that I don’t). It is ridiculously complex with an unbelievable number of quite large and influential players involved. All of them have a piece of the puzzle and will fight to the death to maintain control of that piece. That makes inroads by technology very tough, expensive, and often fruitless. There is a TON of back slapping and hand shaking and laws in place to protect it all (or protect FROM it all as the title insurance guys found out last year).

Heck, most people still think the “MLS” is just one huge system that covers the whole country and includes every home on the market (I also guess they believe it’s controlled by NAR or something). That is all false.

There are hundreds of “MLS’s” all ferociously protecting their “territories”. The homes are only allowed on the MLS by the brokers “ok” and is called broker reciprocity. We are often able to access the “MLS” data for any given area due to a completely secondary system called IDX which is usually provided by a 3rd party provider (such as Superlative, LLC). Some MLS’s provide their own IDX service. This is how we get our data (which is not the same as what agents can have access to). Same data, just not as complete.

However… there is great demand on the consumer side for greater transparency in the real estate industry and they are looking to the internet for it. I don’t believe real estate agents will ever be completely eliminated from the process for the large majority of transactions, for many of the reasons sdrealtor mentioned. Each property is just too different and the transaction too large to make sight unseen (for most people). There are large liabilities involve as well. Yes, most of the time it gets covered over in the good times and gets horrible in the bad.

The internet will continue to play a huge part in real estate going forward, but there are many, many challenges facing a complete phase out of the real estate agent profession. Most of the change will come from the inside-out I believe. RE/MAX has very recently linked together all of its brokers (getting permission from every, or nearly every MLS in the country) to put together one of the very first complete MLS directories ever. If you thought Realtor.com was it… you were wrong.