If this deal were to go-through, it'd be a massive consolidation of the online real estate industry. Zillow keeps saying otherwise, but local MLSs are going away.
When I bought the house, My agent spent total of less than ten hours showing the houses and made 30K with 3% he collects. (He was even absent at final walk through vacationing)
I believe Real Estate Agents even got a law passed where you can't be a real estate agent unless you work for someone for year in California. Really? You can be a doctor and do surgery on Patients on your day 1 as a Doctor but you apparently being real estate agent requires some unknown skills.
I'm about to make a big move, and it is absurd that the only value the agents I'm talking to are (that a user on Reddit can't provide by telling me about the area) providing is the MLS they have access to.
The 6% commission, you would think, would be a price subject to market forces, but due to collusion among realtors, its locked in. Why anti-trust isn't investigating? Lobbying, that's why.
A good agent really shines when you get into "unusual" situations, by providing you with good advice when the way is not clear. If you buy and sell houses a few times you will see some of these situations.
When I began talking pricing on the house, the FIRST thing out of the realtors mouth was “Since you aren’t using an agent we can knock $x off the price of the house” that was before and negotiating had started, and before I made any offer.
And to even sweeten the deal more, the selling realtor was the owner of the house I ended up buying, so there was no commission for the seller to add into the price really. Needless to say, after negotiating we got the house much cheaper than equivalent houses were selling for.
In each case, having a real estate agent to act as my "agent" when negotiating with the buyer/seller proved to be valuable. He/she understands real home values and selling trends through experience, not through algorithms. He/she also can spot warning signs for a property, usually has plenty of good vendor contacts, and can guide a buyer or seller through fairly complicated process.
I would absolutely recommend hiring an agent for a first-time home buyer or seller.
However when it comes to just "finding" property to show you; I agree agents and the MLS are becoming obsolete. In fact the second house we bought we had picked out before hiring our agent. So I'm all for open listing and open data.
I really hope that this will change.
MLS's can choose to syndicate their data to third-parties using services like ListHub or Point2 - but usually stipulate that the data must always point back to the listing agent so they stay part of the selling process.
Companies like Zillow and Trulia have challenged this model. Increasingly, they've become the de-facto starting-point for real estate research. They've built more-user-friendly interfaces, and surfaced public-records information along with property listings in order to present a more-compelling way to buy and sell houses. Furthermore, they've done this while positioning themselves as advertising companies so as not to upset realtors or make them feel as-if they're being cut out of the process.
The big complaint realtors have had with Zillow and Trulia usually centers around two concepts. One is "stale" data. The typical claim is that once data is syndicated from an MLS through a syndicator like ListHub to a site like Zillow things may have changed on-the-ground and the data may be stale. Another complaint is that Zillow's business model is built on the backs of the work realtors have done. They source all the information, and Zillow earns money from redistributing that data.