Toronto Life says:

Realtors are still trying to keep the public’s hands off MLS, but you can’t hoard information in the information age The main incentive for selling your own home is, of course, to avoid paying the real estate agent’s fees, which...

Realtors are still trying to keep the public’s hands off MLS, but you can’t hoard information in the information age

The main incentive for selling your own home is, of course, to avoid paying the real estate agent’s fees, which can be enormous, usually amounting to five per cent of the value of your biggest asset. A DIY seller of a $431,000 house (the average house price in Toronto in 2010) would save $24,350 (including HST). You could buy a new car for that. Even if your buyer uses an agent, which most buyers do, and you’re on the hook to pay a 2.5 per cent commission, you’d still save more than 10 grand. In the same dramatic way consumers dumped travel agents to buy cruises, hotels and plane tickets over the Internet, I expect that we will soon be rethinking the way we use real estate agents, if we use them at all.

For the moment, we still need agents—not because of all the services they provide, but because of just one. We can’t list our homes on MLS.ca without them. MLS, the Multiple Listings Service, accounts for 90 per cent of all residential sales in Canada. House hunters can browse the site (and nose around their neighbour’s kitchen, right down to the Sub-Zero refrigerator), but the Canadian Real Estate Association controls the flow of information and carefully guards the most up-to-date data about sales.

Until last fall, CREA rules dictated that only traditional agents—those representing clients through the entire process, from appraisal to final sale—were allowed to list on the database. This gave CREA and its member boards across the country a virtual monopoly on real estate listings.

See Toronto Life article by Jan Wong »