brokers

That thinking treats brokers as commodities when we can see clearly that great brokers earn 10x a mediocre broker, suggesting there is probably some skill.

The brokers already got paid, and had plenty of opportunity to sell their shares if they wanted to.

Edit: this was in Boston, which tends to have a pretty competitive rental market, and brokers are pretty standard.

People who live in these cities feel like the problem of rental brokers is worse than it actually is.

Yeah, there aren't many brokers in SF, it's much more of a NYC/Boston phenomenon.

That is, brokers offer some bundle of services and a startup tries to unbundle and charge a fair price per line item.

Open table style scheduling for showings, and that brokers were worthless middlemen that should have gone extinct at least a decade ago.

As much as anti-broker vitriol is popular here on HN, whether you agree with it or not, brokers do provide a service.

Do they owe money back to the brokers that made the IPO?

Shadowy data brokers ( But we learned about World-Check, a confidential database owned by the financial information giant Thomson Reuters.

I have used brokers here in Manhattan and find their services well worth the 15% cost.

It's right next to the 'buy/long' field/dropdown for most online brokers.

But brokers and realtors have conditioned the public into believing that a 3% or 10% commission on the transaction is "reasonable".

It is easy to see this because there is massive turnover in the broker business and almost all of the rental brokers you see in New York charging "extortionate" fees are, for the most part, broke.

Brokers are like job recruiters: they have access to more listings than you do as an individual and sometimes have exclusive agreements with individual properties.