This entirely depends on the real estate agent. For the company I work for, a decent amount of purchases are made from afar, where an agent really helps with fi

This entirely depends on the real estate agent. For the company I work for, a decent amount of purchases are made from afar, where an agent really helps with finding and buying a property. Some of our purchases come through with "pocket listings", where an agent knows of a house or piece of land that someone would sell, and approaches the seller with a buyer already. How would you do this with tech? There's also the agent's access to their rolodex, which new agents will not necessarily have, they'll depend on leads from zillow, trulia, knocking on doors, etc. It's also "free" to buy with an agent. For most higher end listings, it is expected that you do participate in the monthly mailer real estate magazines, that's just the cost of doing business. Brokerages do buy these in bulk, and can offer the discounts to an agent to participate in this sort of marketing. All of this is pretty tough to do, you can't just wrap the MLS in a skin, make some signs and be in business. Real estate isn't just a tech problem, though there are some things you can do with tech to make the buying, researching and selling process easier. You have to have distinctions for your specific market, some of these don't make sense nationwide, but are very important locally. For example, a "deep water canal for sailboat" is a term that comes up pretty often in Florida, an Ohana Suite is something that is often requested in Hawaii. Local knowledge matters unless you're in suburbia where literally every house fits into a formula consisting of: ++school - commute time + square footage - age of house +++in monthly payment. The formula would be different for every buyer. Disclaimer: these opinions are my own, not of the company i work for.