The Real Estate Bundle Is Coming Apart — But Not the Way Anyone Predicted
For twenty years, real estate commentators have framed the industry’s future as a survival contest: agents versus apps, full commission versus flat fee, human judgment versus algorithms. It made for good headlines. It was also, it turns out, the wrong question. Consumers were never debating whether agents should exist. They were quietly asking something much narrower — how much help do I actually need for this particular transaction? — and the industry just wasn’t set up to answer that question flexibly. Now, thanks to a legal settlement that nobody in the business asked for, it’s being forced to.