When you buy a car, you look for the manufacturer, the brand, and the after-sales service. When you go to a restaurant, you look for the ambience and the food. When you walk into a supermarket, you look for the one with the best variety, the one that has what you came for.
When you buy real estate, you look for people.
I have spent twenty-two years building sales and marketing teams across the Gulf, MENA, and beyond, and if you ask me what my biggest achievement is, it is not a project or a transaction. It is building the right team. Because in this business, the product may be bricks, but the purchase is always human.
WE NEVER FORGET WHO SOLD US OUR HOME
Think about your own life. You may not remember the model of the first television you bought, but you remember the person who sold you your first home. And your second. And your third. Not the developer’s logo, but the agent who sat with you, who answered the phone at nine in the evening, and who told you the truth when it would have been easier to tell you what you wanted to hear.
It was never only about the developer. It was about how you were treated across the buying cycle. First impressions can carry disproportionate weight in this profession because early interactions often determine whether trust develops at all.
THE PREDICTION THAT KEEPS BEING WRONG
I can write tens of articles about the brokerage market, but let me address the one question that follows this profession everywhere: won’t technology replace it? First, it was the portals. Now it is AI.
I do not believe technology will eliminate the need for brokers, but it will redefine what clients need brokers for.
Because what a broker actually sells is not information. Information is free now. What we sell is a second opinion. When you are about to make one of the largest financial decisions of your life, you want someone you trust, even a stranger who has earned that trust in a single meeting, to challenge your assumptions, interpret the market and tell you when a deal does not make sense. That judgement cannot be downloaded. That is where I see myself, and that is the investment I choose to make: in people who can carry that trust.
And second, you want someone who knows the market, including prices, trends and what is really happening behind the headlines, to translate a flood of data into a decision you can live with for twenty years.
THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE CONVICTION
If you think this is sentiment, look at the scale of what brokers stand in the middle of.
Global real estate is worth $393.3 trillion as of 2025, according to Savills. It is the largest store of wealth on the planet, exceeding the combined value of global equities and debt. In fact, all the gold ever mined ($20.2 trillion) equals barely 5% of what the world’s property is worth.
Every year, a share of that colossal asset base changes hands, and intermediaries are at the centre of it. The global brokerage and agency fee pool is estimated at $0.9 to $1.5 trillion annually today, and is projected to approach $2 trillion by the early 2030s. Roughly 0.3–0.4% of the world’s largest asset class converts into broker revenue every single year. The continued scale of brokerage revenues does not prove that the profession is immune to disruption, but it does show that intermediation still carries substantial economic value.
In Saudi Arabia, the story is even sharper. In 2025, the Real Estate Exchange recorded SAR 336.6 billion in trading, around $90 billion, across more than 265,000 transactions. At the standard 2.5% commission, that represents a theoretical pool of SAR 8.4 billion a year, with a realistic addressable pool of SAR 4 to 6 billion before we count leasing, off-plan sales and property management. The market itself is forecast to grow from $68.5 billion in 2024 to $111.8 billion by 2030, nearly 9% a year. And the new Law of Real Estate Ownership by Non-Saudis will bring exactly the buyers who may need brokers most: people entering an unfamiliar market, legal system and culture. Many of these buyers may discover property through a platform, but when legal systems, market norms and large amounts of capital are unfamiliar, trusted human advice can become more valuable rather than less.
WHO DO WE SERVE?
A master broker once told me: “I serve the developer, not the buyer.”
I did not comment. But I will answer him here.
For me, I serve clients, whether they are buyers, investors, developers, suppliers or my own employees. The moment a broker chooses one side of the table and abandons the other, he stops being an adviser and becomes a salesman. Transactional selling is precisely the part of brokerage most exposed to automation. Advisory work, where judgement, context and accountability matter, is much harder to commoditise.
This is why, when people ask me about the future of our profession, I tell them the broker of the next decade will be more powerful than the broker of the last one, armed with AI for research, matching and paperwork, and freed to focus on the parts of the job that create enduring value: advice, advocacy and accountability. The technology handles the transaction. The human handles the trust.
THE OLDEST TECHNOLOGYThe world does not need real estate brokers out of habit. It needs them because property is local, capital is global, and someone credible must stand between the two. It needs them because behind every one of those 265,000 Saudi transactions last year was a family, an investor or a founder, a person making a decision that will shape their life for decades and wanting one thing above all: someone to trust.
Trust may be the oldest technology in business. And as the rest of the transaction becomes increasingly automated, it may also become the broker’s most valuable remaining advantage.
About the Author
Mohamad Rabi Itani is a real estate professional with extensive experience on projects in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. He writes about real estate, business, projects and marketing.
References
https://impacts.savills.com/market-trends/how-much-is-global-real-estate-worth.html?s=2025
https://www.imarcgroup.com/saudi-arabia-real-estate-market
https://www.factmr.com/report/real-estate-brokerage-market
https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/5866791/real-estate-agency-brokerage-global-market