Are Real Estate Agents Obsolete? Hello and welcome to Todd Miller TV. You are probably watching this because you saw the title, “Are real estate agents obsolete?” and there is sort of a debate going on about you know what value real estate agents add and I want to start with a study that was done.

It has been super widely disseminated on the internet and it was done by some Stanford University Professor. So as soon as you say professors you have to you know you maybe have a little bit of doubt in there because sometimes they can have the craziest things, but what it did was it compared a group of people who are selling their house by themselves and then it compared what the real estate agents values got. Actually the study is if you want to talk about a skewed study, this is the most skewed study that there was and this is why.So what they did is they analyzed the professors who were selling so faculty members of Stanford so very narrow group who were only selling houses that were located on the Stanford campus, which can only be purchased by faculty members so it was ridiculous because they pick the most niche market and they basically did an analysis. The people didn’t get that much more. They got more but not that much more so we are missing the point on a couple of things first of all. One of the things real estate agents do is they brought in and market your home but if you are already from home could only be bought by a very narrow group of people then you don’t necessarily do real estate for that. People did get more money by the way. I just want to point that out. The other thing is the hassle in time and a lot of these people are doing a lot of work themselves and they didn’t have to do that. They have to spend money, the advertiser market.Real estate agent handled everything for them. So the study itself is ridiculous you know when you pick such a small niche you know that is like saying real estate is going to help you find the dorm room, do they add any value. No, just dorm room, you just go to the door. I mean say, “I want to get a room?” right same thing with you know on campus you know faculty member only purchases. Do you really need real estate agents for that if faculty members can only buy the houses? You know you are not broadening the market but is this a really, it is a really bad study and if they are trying to prove a point and they just pick this niche they really over analyze the day that they went through all this crazy numbers to justify it and it was pretty bad. Anyway I just want to point that out. So the question is, “Are real estate agents obsolete?” and the answer is well, I think you know it. So one of the things I have seen recently is these people promoting realtor.com saying, “Hey look you can by pass your real estate agent, get your house in realtor.com just by going in and paying for you know a thing on there” you can list your house in realtor.com. Well here is the problem there are thousands and thousands of websites where the homes can be found and if you only put it on one website if you pay to put a realtor.com.What are all the other websites or Mozilla, what about Trulia, what about every other website that has real estate agent listings and the truth is they only come from one source. All of those listings come from real estate agents. We populate the database of everything and I think what some people have said is what we want to take that over and juts it ourselves. Well it is not going to happen because we own it meaning we have invested in it. It is our database. It is something professionally that we use amongst each other and then some of that information not all of it, a small part of it we push out to everybody else. So this concept that you don’t need us or that we are obsolete, you are going to find a way around this, I think it is folly. If you look at what the big sites like Zillow and Trulia are doing what they are actually doing is they are catering to real estate agents meaning the eyeballs come on them and they push you off to an agent to try to sell you agent services so I think that answers the question, they are the big players the market place the next time they are doing it.So I think for all the other people out there that are trying to say, “No, don’t use a broker cut that out, just go to our webpage like you know and our 10 listings that we have on here, you know buy one of these houses from these people. I think it is crazy, anyway so that is my update for today and I’m looking forward to seeing you on the next video. Thanks.