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Comment by mcoliver | Hacker News Reader

This comment is focused on USA. Some people need or want an agent, some people don't. For the majority the checklist for buying a home is fairly straight forward and could be automated with checklists, yelp, Plaid/UWM, and DocuSign. But not all.

The bigger issue that I think almost everyone can agree on is the standardized percentage thing. Being an agent should be a flat negotiated fee or billed like the trades per hour / cost+. The good ones charge more, you pay for what you need, etc...

One other thing. I'm not usually for more government intervention but at least in the USA, the government backstops the vast majority of mortgages (Fannie and Freddie), and collects rent in perpetuity through property taxes. They are so integral to the housing market that they should be providing the standardized forms and checklists that would cover most residential real estate transactions. Not Redfin/Zillow and definitely not NAR/MLS.

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The title company is the one who sends and receives wires and executes the nuts-and-bolts transfer of ownership. You could imagine fintechs getting into that space even with traditional agents, and you could imagine title companies catering to for-sale-by-owner.

Title companies are already pretty efficient and relatively cheap... not a lot of margin or process to improve with technology.

Exactly! I’m pretty sure Old Republic’s fee was a couple grand, nowhere near the mid-range luxury car price that the realtors collectively made on the transaction.

Keep in mind this has to include downside protection to cover the very real risk of someone initiating a suit in case they screw up (which I'm sure happens from time to time).

I think overall, what a lot of this entire discussion misses is that 90, maybe 99% of transactions are pretty straightforward, but the 1% where things go haywire, might cost 10, even 100x as much in wasted time, money, etc. Real estate brokerage is a regulated professional service which means by law, there's a minimum standard of care owed to anyone who uses these peoples' services. This costs money to provide which ultimately means a lot of the costs of the problem cases end up socialized/spread out, over everyone.

This feels quite unfair if you've got your act together and everything goes smoothly, but it seems hard to know upfront which ones will be the hard cases, or not.

Am I getting a 5x higher standard of care from a realtor in San Francisco vs. Chicago, simply because the equivalent condos are 5x as expensive?

Good call out. And I am aware of the history and edge cases with residential real estate in the US.

So as to not talk past each other I'm specifically talking about present and future vanilla residential real estate transactions. For example w2 income with history, deed in your name, <10k sqft lot sfh or condo/townhome in a city.

For these things I struggle to imagine a future where the government does not have a clear view as to who owns and can transfer property (property taxes, IRS filings, Fannie/Freddie, recorded deeds, etc). They are backstopping the mortgage, they should understand what they are lending against.

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