system
A chat on subreddit /r/wallstreetbets
human
You greatly underestimate the incompetence of people. Probably 75% of people need a real estate agent. The real problem is how low the bar to enter the industry is.
gpt
Sure. There are people who need it. But, realtors have managed to somehow overstay their obsolescence and maintain ubiquity even among the portion that don't really need their services, or at least not all of them, despite many of their functions being accessible via the internet. A good but not perfect parallel is travel agents. Before online booking and the vast travel resources that became available to the general public, they could serve a real function. Now, there are some people who still use them, but their monopoly on information has disappeared and their market share and compensation has reduced accordingly. Realtors somehow have maintained their market share and compensation as share of sale even though their monopoly on information has disappeared.  It's interesting how resilient that sector has been.