The professional-class bubble is bursting

« Oh well. There’s always real estate – isn’t there? Don’t count on it. The residential real estate cartel is long overdue for breakup. One of these days, real estate agents will go the way of travel agents and full-service brokers. The only reason they’ve been able to suck such high commissions from the pockets of consumers for so long is their ability to control access to the MLS. That has finally begun to change. Now Power Corp. has bought up a bunch of do-it-yourself real estate services and folded them together into an outfit called ComFree, whose clients can list their houses on MLS. ComFree is barely on the radar screen in most of the country. But it has captured a third of the market in Quebec City. »