About five years ago, a TV interviewer asked John Pasalis if real estate was going to be disrupted by the internet the way Expedia had upended the travel industry.

“No,” said the founder of Leslieville’s Realosophy brokerage.

That answer hasn’t changed in the wake of a recent Competition Tribunal decision that had some worried technology would do to traditional realtors what Uber has wrought on the taxi business.

The decision is expected to result in the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) lifting restrictions on how brokers can distribute data on previous property sales online. For years, TREB argued that information should remain private and be handed off directly to clients by agents.

The release of property sales history is a win for Virtual Office Websites (VOWs) such as Realosophy, which give consumers data that standard MLS listings don’t provide.

But they don’t believe it will eliminate traditional brokers.

Unlike buying a plane ticket online where “the price is the price,” real estate is the biggest investment most people make.

“The risk is generally too great for someone to just do it in an automated fashion,” said Pasalis.

It’s not clear yet how much sales history the tribunal will recommend be published.

It is still working with the Competition Bureau, which sought to have the data open, and TREB to determine how the decision translates to practice.

But when it comes to real estate and technology, think evolution, not revolution, said Springrealty owner Ara Mamourian, whose business was among the first to adopt a VOW.

“Having that information out there doesn’t diminish our role as a realtor. It’s just our roles have changed,” he said.

Mamourian knows consumers want the data. The heading on his latest blog post says, “Want Sold Data? Soon, baby, soon!”

The tribunal decision has the potential to help thin Toronto’s “herd” of more than 40,000 TREB member agents, wrote Mamourian. But he figures those are the agents that are going down anyway.

The main role of a realtor used to be distributing sales and listing information. Now consumers want to do their research online. But there is no substitute for a human being in a property transaction.

“The real estate industry, as crazy as it is right now, it’s not that easy to buy if you don’t know what you’re doing. When you have people who don’t know what they’re doing, they either offer too little and don’t get the house or offer way too much and overpay,” he said.

TREB’s privacy arguments probably aren’t the best business model for today’s market, argues Sunil Johal, policy director at the Mowat Centre, School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto.

Access to price histories in the U.S. hasn’t affected commissions or the number of people who use agents there, he said.

“So I don’t know if TREB is actually fighting the right battle here. They probably should be embracing this data revolution and trying to get more data in the hands of people,” he said.

Johal also wonders how long it will be before there’s a Canadian version of Zillow, the U.S. website that provides a deep data dive into about 100 million properties.

Will Mitchell, a professor of strategic management at U of T’s Rotman School of Management, used Zillow when he was selling his house in North Carolina two years ago before buying a home in Toronto.

The U.S. experience “was just a more transparent negotiation,” he said.

In Toronto, buyers know that if they bid too low, they’re going to lose a house. Mitchell thinks that biases the market in favour of over-bidding.

A site like Zillow “will actually take some of the overbids out of the market even if the agents are there. So the agents won’t make quite as much money.

A couple of years ago, Mitchell had a student in Toronto who tried to create a business model for an online brokerage system. The student found the system worked in favour of traditional brokers.

“They just gave up because of the barriers to getting the historical information about prices,” he said.

“If this change actually happens, it will fundamentally change the nature of the real estate industry in Canada and in my view, in a good way,” said Mitchell.

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It should create more opportunity for new online agents who may just work at connecting buyers and sellers willing to do most of the work themselves.

“On a vanilla-type sale, it will almost certainly take a big chunk of the margin out of the market. That’s money that will go into some combination of the buyer and seller’s pockets.”

The Zillow effect

Realtors who worry they won’t be needed if consumers can access all property information online should look to the U.S. for reassurance, experts say.

Web giant Zillow offers property shoppers and sellers an accessible deep data dive into millions of properties with information on past sales, neighbourhoods, rents, foreclosures, schools, renovations and mortgages.

What doesn’t Zillow do? Compete with brokers, chief marketing officer Jeremy Wacksman told the Toronto Star. Here’s what else he had to say about the company.

What is Zillow?

We’re a media company. We sell ads, not houses. We attract audience to our websites and mobile apps and then we connect that audience with advertisers, professionals who are building their business with exposure to buyers or sellers.

We really want to be the hub of all things real estate to help with the decision (consumers) are making — sales, foreclosures, mortgage information, rentals.

When the site was founded 10 years ago, what did it set out to do?

Back then, the internet was far less sophisticated and penetrative. Our co-founders were simply trying to buy a house and they just couldn’t get more data. They couldn’t get a better picture to do their own math and analysis on the market. That data was widely available. It just wasn’t packaged up and provided in a way that was easy to understand.

Will Zillow move into Canada?

Zillow is focused on growing in the U.S. and has no plans to expand north of the border.

Do you compete with realtors?

The answer is no. Early on, there was an oft-cited discussion that Zillow’s going to give rise and become a brokerage and try to replace a brokerage. Ten years and 2,500 employees later that’s just not our model. And the reason that’s not our model is they’re different parts of the industry. Recruiting and growing an agency base is a very different job than building technology for buyers and renters. They both need to exist.

What tools do you provide realtors?

Zillow has a platform that allows agents to go to past clients and solicit ratings and reviews of the deals they did. They could upload all of their past transactions so they can have a record of all the homes they bought or sold to show their local market expertise.