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Face it, you have had your home on the market for 4 months, your real estate agent with 27 years experience has done nothing but use your home as a way to find new buyers to represent, and whines incessantly about how expensive the ads in the newspaper are and how you need to drop your price so she can get her commission before the listing expires.

Yet,  you know that when you were looking for your next home, that you never once looked in a newpaper, you looked at the web. You never thought about an open house, you found the home that you were looking for online, did a drive by, and then called the broker listed. And your present real estate agent is so mired in the toxic phrase “We have always done it this way” that you know how to better market your home than the “professional” does.

Well, there is a surge in online companies that are developing the services and tools you will need to market your home and save on the 6 percent commission that your agent presently is convinced is the gold standard. And it will be here sooner than you think.

Just as the travel agents went through a painful transition from a monopoly position to one of a boutique status, so will the real estate industry. And it will be sheperded there by internet companies.

“We think as the market goes on to become a buyer’s market, we have a huge advantage over anyone else as 80 percent of our business comes from buyers,” said Pat Lashinsky, senior vice president of new product development at online real estate service ZipRealty.

The stakes are high. The real estate market powered the economy through the tech bust. Perhaps as a result the Internet has scarcely changed the way the vast majority of homes are bought and sold—even as the music, advertising, and software industries have been dramatically altered.

Now that the technology business is rebounding, though, real estate is starting to stumble. That could give online real estate companies a chance to disrupt the home-buying market and break into the mainstream. “Sellers never really migrated to the Internet, but now as they are disadvantaged they will use the Internet in ways that never happened before,” said Brad Inman, founder and publisher of real estate news service Inman News.

“Many potential home buyers have been on the sidelines, some ‘kicking the tires,’ but mostly waiting for sellers to compromise on prices and terms,” said David Lereah, chief economist at the National Assocation of Realtors. Online brokers like ZipRealty and Redfin, in addition to sites serving up information on home buying, such as Zillow, are eager to help buyers kick those tires. via Red Herrring

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