Is the traditional residential real estate industry collapsing?

If you search for residential real estate mergers and acquisitions in your favorite internet search portal, you’ll see many mergers are occurring.

We are seeing a drop on volume of “available” residential properties that agents can list for sale. This “shortage” of available properties that “Listing” agents can make available to purchase also hurts the “Buyer’s” agent on the other side of the transaction which severely limits the properties available for their “buyer” clients to purchase. I believe every market across the US is experiencing this problem.

Note: In case you’re asking, more than 95% of the transactions I’ve researched on the multiple listing services involve separate agents for both sides of each real estate transaction.

The growing threat of (a) iBuyers (ie, “instant” cash buyers / investors) scooping up thousands of homes before they hit the normal buyer market; (b) people using Airbnb and other rental services to rent their properties for monthly income and not listing them for sale; (c) vast number of millenniels with massive student loan debt, no desire to settle down, and lower paying salaries than they expected; and (d) many homeowners who have simply realized that if they sell their homes for a high price, they would just have to find another home for a higher price in today’s market….are all signals to the residential real estate brokerage companies that change and adaptation is in the wind.

My Blog post: Is the traditional residential real estate industry collapsing?

Jim Parker - Broker at ACCESS BROKERAGE INC. - 770-265-7293 - jim@abuyeragent.com