What's wrong with middle men? They provide a service, too.
Eg your bank genuinely helps with finance and transfers compared to transacting directly on a blockchain or snail mailing cash around.
> I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit.
Yes, division of labour!
> What's wrong with middle men?
Purely on a philosophical point of view and depending on where you live, they do nothing but increase the costs without adding value.
For example, realtors made sense back in the day when there was no internet. But, what value does a real estate agent add in 2026? An owner can list their apartment/house directly online. The buyer and search, find and contact the owner directly, a lot of times even for free (FB Marketplace, WhatsApp groups, etc.).
The most common argument is - "when things go wrong, the agent will take on the liability for the listing", but that is rarely the case in real life (again, may vary greatly depending on where you live). In most of Asia, this is not the case at all. They take their nice fat commission and wash their hands off later, not even picking up your calls most of the time when there is an issue.
So what do agents do now? They hoard information instead. They advertise good listings, but to talk to the owner you will need to engage (and pay them) first.
Real estate agents are just one. Car dealerships rank right on the second in my list.
We don't need more agents. We need democratized access to information.
I disagree. I do not care about the details of a ton of stuff. I do not even understand them.
On the other hand, I do care about people that are knowledgeable of these details, specialized, and trust to handle them for me for a fee.
That’s true of banking, realting, health, security, building, manufacturing of everything I use (or almost). That doesn’t prevent me from vaguely understanding the principles and some bits. And that saved me a ton of time and worry. But for the few times one agent does not work up to his promises.
I am 49, I have dealt enough with try to do all by myself, and I do appreciate and rely onto middlemen way earlier now.
This is fine and works for small ticket items. But in some cases, you will end up paying upto 50% of the ticket value. Eg. Realtors in some countries charge 50% of the transaction value - while the value they provide doesn't scale with transaction amount. Usually, a $200,000 house and a $2,000,000 house require the same amount of paper work (of course, depends on where you live, etc).
Yes. The crucial bit is that there are plenty of competing middle men you can choose from (and are also allowed to do it yourself, where possible).
> An owner can list their apartment/house directly online.
How will anyone find the house? If I use an online estate agent, then that's still a middle man. If I publish adverts on Facebook or Google, that's a middle man. If I'm hoping that I can generate enough SEO for my house to appear at the top of searches, that's also relying upon a middle man - the search engine. I guess I could just put a board outside the house with a URL on it and hope someone stops to take a photo.
Estate agents provide that marketing service as well as others around arranging viewings and interaction with solicitors, although that might be UK specific. But they do provide a service that would take a crazy amount of time for you to replicate by yourself for a one-off house sale.
> How will anyone find the house? If I use an online estate agent, then that's still a middle man.
Right now your realtor is paying your listing fees, paying a photographer (maybe) and paying to stage the home (again, maybe). Those are all fixed fees. Then the realtor takes a percentage of the transaction. If the realtor goes away, those fixed-fee services can all still exist and be easy to use. You could even replace the realtor with a general contractor sort of person who manages them and also charges a fixed fee and it’d still be a win.
Thanks, this is the best logical explanation to this argument, hands-down.
I find it amusing that the person who brought up the word "middleman" is implicitly pointing at big internet companies, and here you are telling me Facebook or WhatsApp are not middleman.
It is a very broad categorization to call anyone in-between a middleman. By that logic, these are all middleman because I use their service to sell a house:
1) My ISP because I use internet through them
2) My phone service provider, because I make calls via their network
3) My car manufacturer / leasing because I pay a monthly fee to go visit the listing
But, by my perhaps opinionated definition, none of the above should be classified as active middlemen because they don't interfere with my transaction w.r.t the listing. Facebook and WhatsApp are not active middlemen. They are simply just a listing service. I could replace them with say, Craigslist or even a Google sites web page and I would still be fine. The worst that could happen is I might be asked to pay a small fixed fee like $20 for a listing/webpage. The service provider (generally) doesn't care what the listing is about. That's why it's passive.
Real estate agents are active middlemen. They in most cases prevent the transaction altogether if you don't use them. They are not asking a fixed fee, they are asking for a percentage of the transaction - when the value they add doesn't compound with the transaction amount. That's why.
I think the point is to reduce the amount of middleman.
But why? More competing middle men is better than fewer.
The idea is fewer LAYERS of middle men - not less middle men competing for your business.
I.e. get rid of the realtors - don’t get rid of the house photographers, listings sites, and staging companies. Remove a layer between you and a sale, don’t reduce the number of photographers competing to take photos of your home for sale.
Well, you should be free to bypass layers, when you want to. But sometimes they can be useful, and people should be allowed to add layers.
Eg a concierge is purely a middle man between you and various restaurants and venues. Many people find them useful.
If the concierge is outsourcing some of the calls and research she has to make to some assistant in the Philippines, that should be fair game.
I do not disagree. You are free to use a realtor, and/or Facebook, and/or whatever.
We made very good experiences with a realtor when we bought our apartment. Where I live, there is a lot of bureaucracy at play and the process is not easy to understand even when you have experts to ask. There have also been very sophisticated frauds on both sides - sellers and buyers - that a realtor from a well-known franchise blocks.
Generally, I see no problem with competent middle men. They offer a service like any other service. If you want the service, you buy it, and if you don't want it you don't.
> there is a lot of bureaucracy at play and the process is not easy to understand even when you have experts to ask
I’d be willing to bet the reason there is a lot of bureaucracy at play is At least in part because realtors wanted job security. Just like taxes staying complex because of lobbying from tax prep companies.
I'm a bit confused about the tax prep. There's tax prep companies and software in other countries, too, and the incentives seem pretty much the same?
Germany has pretty complicated taxes, but I think they don't seem to have the same tax prep lobbying?
(In Germany, the complicated taxes are partially there because whenever you change anything or remove a complication, some people who currently benefit from that weirdness come out and complain.)
Here in Singapore taxes are mercifully simple.
> For example, realtors made sense back in the day when there was no internet. But, what value does a real estate agent add in 2026? An owner can list their apartment/house directly online. The buyer and search, find and contact the owner directly, a lot of times even for free (FB Marketplace, WhatsApp groups, etc.).
Is anyone forcing you realtors where you live?
FB Marketplace is just another middle man. (And that supports my thesis from another follow up comment: you want lots of competing middle man!)
Btw, real estate agents in eg the UK take about half the cut in a typical home sale compared to the US.
> Car dealerships rank right on the second in my list.
Yes, and as far as I know they are only a problem in the US, and that's because the US has crazy regulations that pretty much mandate car dealerships. In eg Germany you can buy your car direct from Volkswagen or from any dealership you want.
> We don't need more agents. We need democratized access to information.
Let a thousand flowers bloom. We need more agents, more competition. (But also make direct access legal, where possible.)
> Is anyone forcing you realtors where you live?
Yes. You can self-list on fb marketplace, but you can’t list a home in the MLS listing service they all use without using a realtor - and the buyer’s agents won’t show your home or suggest it to their clients.
So yes, they are using their dominant position in the market to protect their dominant position in the market.
Nothing wrong with middle men per se, but problems do arise when we all rely on the same middleman: those become way too powerful and can do nasty things.
By that time, no one can do without the nasty middle man as we have forgotten or never learned the skills to fend for ourselves and are thus beholden to the nasty middle man.
Network effect compounds this
As long as you have plenty of competing middle men, like we do for eg social networks in the real world, it seems all fine.
Remember: Facebook is for grandparents, not where the cool kids hang out.
Where do the cool kids hang out?
In a cool club on the other side of town, where the real cool kids go to sit around and talk bad about the other kids.
Yeah, it's a real cool club and you're not part of it.
That's ok, I dont really like clubs. Too many people
A while ago it was Instagram or perhaps tiktok?
However, take the fact that I have heard of these places as strong evidence that they are no longer cool.
There is in fact nothing wrong with a middle man who provides a service, as long as their power over you is limited to the provision of the service. The "tech platforms" are not middle men in this sense. They don't just provide a service, they also own aspects of your personal life.
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