The franchise model had a good run. Fifty years. Global scale. Billions in fees. It solved a real problem at a time when brand, training, and referral networks were scarce and expensive. That time is over. And USD 2.5 billion in US real estate transactions in the last ninety
Eleven years ago, Tim Urban published an article on Wait But Why that predicted exactly what is happening inside every company right now. Millions of people read it. It went viral across LinkedIn, Twitter, dinner tables. Smart people forwarded it with notes like "fascinating" and "must-read."
This is the second article in a series on AI and the future of real estate brokerage. The first piece - Portals, CRMs, and Traditional Agents: Which Part of Real Estate Survives the Autopilot? - examined the structural shift across the whole industry. This article goes deeper on the agent
In March 2026, Sequoia Capital published a piece called ‘Services : The New Software.’ It argues that the next trillion-dollar company won’t look like a software company. It will look like a services firm — but run entirely on AI infrastructure. The thesis is built on one uncomfortable ratio: for every