The realty profession has made it suck for most realtors and all homeowners.

It’s hard for most realtors right now. I have some in my ward who are really struggling. The notion that they’re all making money hand over fist for an hour of work a week really isn’t true. Most just don’t have much work to do and it’s financially stressful. Too few houses for sale and too many realtors out there. The NAR has created a profession that has a very low qualification bar for entry which is driving the number of realtors but is increasing becoming obsolete on account of technology.

Meanwhile, that technology means that those in the market don’t need realtors much anymore. We can see home inventory on our phones, download contracts off the internet, and even sell our own homes with products like Homie. So we’re left wondering why we fork out 6% of our equity to a modestly involved middle man. But the realty profession has entrenched themselves so deep in the home buying process it’s almost borderline illegal to not use them.

Now, there are a few in the realty industry who are making gobs of easy money and they don’t want to let that go. So they bring in lots of new realtors (strength in numbers) and work together to force buyers to use their services.

So, like a lot of shady things, a few get rich, most suffer, and we all hate everybody.