Who's Playing Monopoly?

What is your barrier to entry?

Truth of the matter is real estate agents have, for all intensive purposes, a monopoly on the real estate game. In a recent article in the National Post, Garry Marr wrote about the dominance of MLS over the market since it started some 50 years ago.

In it he focuses on two different MLS systems. One for the consumers and one for the agents. The agent's version is much more robust and complete where as the consumer facing one is a knock down version. With today's privacy laws it will not be changing anytime soon, nor should it.

The real story here was that $131.9 Billion in real estate transacted through the MLS last year. That constitutes an estimated $6.595 Billion in commission pulled from the pockets of hard working Canadians. Was this necessary? This is a societal loss of billions of dollars done $15,000 at a time. Are you next?

I feel a need to answer a question that some may ask. Is a monopoly bad? Let's call on expert Phil Holden, an economics professor in Greece, to answer the question in this video from Youtube (unfortunately he has disabled embedding).

Is it coincidence that all the downsides experienced in a monopolistic situation Phil speaks about are alive and well in today's real estate industry?

To lighten the mood slightly here is Ernest's view...


Remember that no matter how bad it gets it can always get worse.

Communist Monopoly anyone?


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