Back when the commercial internet first started to take off it was uncommon to use your real name online. Instead people relied on usernames and other pseudynoms to represent themselves. I honestly can’t remember what I used in those days, but I’m sure it was something ridiculous.

Over time though that started to change. 

Blogging started to take off in the late 1990s. And we started to become more comfortable sharing personal information online. Perhaps the biggest shift though, came with the introduction of Facebook in 2004 (over 10 years ago!). All of a sudden people – young college students initially – started sharing lots of personal information online, including photos of themsleves and their friends.

But this wasn’t an overnight change. When Facebook first launched, privacy was an important component. It still is, but I would argue that it has become less central given how public a lot of other social media platforms are today. Twitter, for instance, is what it is today largely because of its publicness. 

For my own social media accounts, I have made every single one of them completely public. From Twitter to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, nothing I post to social media is restricted in any way. And I do that because I believe we are headed towards a world with more – not less – openness, transparency and publicness.

Of course, I’m not just talking about social media and tech. I’m talking about open data in general.

Earlier this year, the Toronto Real Estate Board clamped down on real estate brokers who were publishing historical sales data online. Citing privacy concerns, TREB ordered them to stop or lose their access to the MLS system. 

For those of you not from familiar with the Toronto real estate market, historical sales data for homes is not open and published online. You generally need to go through a realtor to get access to this data. Some think this is the right approach. And others think it is antiquated.

But as I explained above, our conception of what should be private can, and will, evolve over time.

Here are the details on my home:

I purchased it in September 2012 for exactly $400,000 (Canadian). It’s a 650 square foot condo in the St. Lawrence Market neighborhood of Toronto. It has one bedroom, a 400 square foot terrace, one parking spot, and 10′ ceilings.

Sooner or later, I believe this information will be freely available online. But since that’s not the case today, I figured I would just tell you. Sharing this information is not a big deal for me.

The Globe and Mail ran a piece this morning called, The Realtors of Oz: Bidding wars are unnecessarily sleazy.

For anyone who has recently tried to buy a house in Toronto, you’ll know that multiple offer scenarios, also known as “bidding wars”, are a fairly common occurrence. Demand for housing in the city is great and interest rates are low. And so homes are frequently being priced below market to generate a feeding frenzy.

When I read articles like this, I’m reminded of how much frustration I have for the way the real estate market operates today. There’s poor liquidity, there’s a lack of transparency, and there are high transaction costs. I’m a free market kind of a guy and so I’m bothered by how “imperfect” the real estate market remains.

A lot of people in the business like things just the way they are, but I believe that markets function better, for everyone, when they are open and transparent, and all participants have access to information. Thankfully, I do believe that we’re headed towards a world with more transparency, not less. Information wants to be free.

This past Sunday I was over at my father’s place for dinner and we were talking about the high transaction costs associated with buying and selling homes. That is, we weren’t talking about the high price of homes in Toronto, we were only talking about transaction costs and barriers to market liquidity.

For example, let’s say for the sake of simplicity that you own a home that’s worth $1 million and you’d like to sell it and buy a different home that also happens to be worth $1 million. In this case, you’d be making an entirely lateral move. You’re not down sizing or up sizing, you just want a different home–perhaps because you’d prefer a different neighborhood.

In order to do this, you’re going to be faced with a number of costs. But the 2 most significant are real estate commissions and Land Transfer Taxes (both provincial and municipal). You only pay Land Transfer Taxes in Toronto when you buy (take title) of a new property, but they’re unavoidable, unless you’re a first time buyer, in which case you’d qualify for a bit of a rebate.

Real estate commissions are technically optional, but 70-90% of the market in North America still uses a a real estate agent to sell their home (based on the estimates I’ve found). Typically a seller pays around 5% of the sale price. So in this example, you the homeowner would be paying around $50,000 in real estate commissions.

Land Transfer Taxes would be roughly $32,000, and so you’re looking at a total somewhere around $82,000 in order to make this lateral move. This, of course, does not include legal fees or any other moving costs you might incur. It’s a hell of a lot of money and it’s a significant barrier to transacting.

But my hunch is that we’ll eventually see real estate commissions come down. No real estate agent wants to hear this, but I think it’s almost inevitable. The internet, as a disruptive force, is bound to make it happen.