I look at it this way – people fall somewhere in a wide spectrum between “Do-it-yourself” and “Don’t wanna deal with it”
Like anything – construction, for example – if you don’t wanna deal with it, it costs money to have someone else deal with it. And, if you do it yourself, you save alot of money.
To be a do-it-yourselfer, you need both the skills and time to actually do it yourself. I think that very few people have both and so the realtor model will be able to endure. Most people need them.
Of course, this isn’t to say that a small market of do-it-yourselfers doesn’t exist. It does exist, and it can be served by different discounted models, but it is a pretty small market, all things considered.
I suspect that much of the PIGG community has the skills to go without a realtor and so we tend to see the rest of the market as we see ourselves, which I don’t think is the case.
