Real estate agents in the United States collect a 6 percent commission every time they connect buyer and seller. This leads to musings like "Why does New York have so much garbage and Los Angeles so many real estate agents?" (standard answer: "Because New York had first choice"). This kind of humor would hurt realtors' feelings if they weren't raking in $192 billion each year (source: 1997 Census, probably nearly double that today). Realtors are precisely the sorts of intermediaries that Internet technology was supposed to eliminate. Suppose that these folks were not operating their own realtor.com site. If you were trying to capture a share of this $192 billion, you'd want to start in Category 1 with articles about moving or character sketches for neighborhoods. This content would attract search engine users. Moving into Category 2, you'd run a commission-based classified ad system to connect renters with landlords and buyers with sellers. For a Category 3 service, perhaps you could create a moving planner. You'd get the old address, the new address, and the moving date from the user. You could use that data to help the user find a household mover, disconnect and hook up utilities, compute cost-of-living differences, and arrange personal travel. Meanwhile, you'd be bombarding the person with ads from competing communications, furniture, and appliance vendors in the new locale. For a Category 4 application you'd cut deals with other real estate sites to query their databases. If a user made a transaction on that foreign site, you'd split the commissions. Meanwhile, back in the real world the realtors have a monopoly on the Multiple Listing Service, the canonical database of houses for sale, and realtor.com is the only Web interface to it. Still, you can see that realtor.com incorporates many of the elements of our abstract plan.
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