Real estate war in cyberspace: An emerging electronic market?

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Abstract:

In this paper, we explore how electronic commerce, the World-Wide Web in particular, is affecting the real estate industry. Real estate is a promising setting for studying electronic commerce because it is an information-intensive and informationdriven industry; transaction-based, with high value and asset-specificity; with many market-intermediaries (agents and brokers who connect buyers and sellers rather than buying or selling themselves); and experiencing on-going information technology (IT) related changes. We analyze a real estate transaction to suggest where IT might change the process of buying or selling a house and discuss several current ventures in this area. This analysis suggests that Web-based commerce is eroding the long-enjoyed information monopoly of real-estate agents and electronic commerce applications have the potential to drastically change current practices in the real-estate industry, including the disintermediation of agents.