> Best case, if you can get it, would be the buyer and seller meet up without the agents and each has an attorney to help with legal. I did this years ago, and

> Best case, if you can get it, would be the buyer and seller meet up without the agents and each has an attorney to help with legal. I did this years ago, and it all went well. There's a substantial opportunity for Redfin here if they can connect buyers and sellers directly and charge a reasonable fee for all the boilerplate involved. At the time there wasn't an infrastructure to find homes with this selling arrangement so it was literally a "for sale by owner" sign in the yard. I'm curious about the specific wording here: > NAR membership is required for agents to access listing databases, lockboxes, and industry-standard contracts Is it possible even in places with this regulatory capture for them to facilitate direct sales? Is it only NAR "databases" "lockboxes" and "contracts" that are unavailable to them, and if Redfin brings their own for both buyers and sellers they're in the clear? I think real estate agents do add some value, after all there are things about properties that you won't know just by looking at online listings and having somebody familiar with an area out there doing some legwork for you is indeed a real job, but it's certainly not commensurate with the 3% of the entire transaction they're extracting.