my, 2 cents, as "Yet another real estate tech founder":<p>1. Slightly linkbaity title (sorry @phil) -- Obviously real estate brokerages "survive" in some form. Great software streamlines. Most of the software out there is just a pain in the ass. But no software will REPLACE brokerage, in the same way that ATMs haven't replaced banks and point of sale systems haven't replaced checkout clerks (entirely).<p>2. What it will mean though, is that the best brokerages will be very tech enabled and be able to operate at much higher leverage w.r.t. human capital than ever before (once the tools are in place). "Real Estate Brokerage" as a profession is a collection of related tasks -- some which can be automated, some which can't. Reliably removing the rote, repeatable components will let really good brokers/brokerages focus on the hard to automate, human elements and do their jobs better and bigger than they do now.<p>One consequence of this is that the richest brokers and brokerages will get richer and the poor ones will go out of business. There will be less options in the marketplace. This is bad.<p>Right now, the spread between a top rental agent and an "average" rental agent is the difference between 500k/year and probably 20k-30/year. In sales, the divide is even bigger because the transaction cuts are bigger.<p>That divide will get bigger as tech adoption becomes the norm.
I think the biggest issue is that they are un-accustomed to technology - most of the real estate agents I've interacted with see it as a necessary pain-in-the-ass, not as something that makes them more productive. I think this will probably begin to change as "digital natives" become more influential in the industry.
Does anyone actually think the bigger brokerages will start innovating with technology? I don't see much changing from the status quo, but I'm not in the industry.