It’s already happened to travel agents, car dealers, wine retailers and stock brokers.
By matching buyers and sellers more efficiently, the Internet has whittled away at the influence of those middlemen. Not only have companies like eBay, Expedia and E*Trade Financial upset established industries, but they’ve delivered lower prices by axing once-lucrative fees and commissions.
Now the nation’s approximately 2 million real estate brokers, who have seen their incomes balloon as housing prices have climbed toward the sky in recent years, fear they’re next in line for what academics like to call “disintermediation.”
Read this article from C|Net and contribute what you know about “disintermediation” at the Whats New Media Wiki
