A huge hurdle with trying to cut costs is because of NAR themselves, and local Realtor Associations. Any Realtor is with NAR and a local Association, which heavily restricts what they can do. Not being in a local Association can remove your access to the MLS, reducing your visibility to other agents, and remove your access to the state-specific legal forms.
Add in closing attorneys and home inspectors being brought in-house to reduce costs, it can be a very expensive start-up cost that would require lots of capital to achieve. Zillow/Opendoor got REALLY close, but they stopped (Zillow) or, like you said, lowball offers because they're fronting all of the backend costs that used to be spread across 4 or 5 different services.
Good points. I totally forgot about the whole home inspection process and how ridiculous it tends to be. Even when they aren't in house, you know it will be someone that the realtor has worked with before. It will certainly catch things because it has to demonstrate its value, and those things will be worth at least hundreds of $$s. Unfortunately, it will also offer no real guarantee that those things were worth catching or that other things weren't missed.
You are right, a party trying to fix this will need great funding, large scale, and they can't be someone that will just sell out (ala zillow). With the NAR's ability to block out parties that they don't like, it might not even be practically possible.
Add in closing attorneys and home inspectors being brought in-house to reduce costs, it can be a very expensive start-up cost that would require lots of capital to achieve. Zillow/Opendoor got REALLY close, but they stopped (Zillow) or, like you said, lowball offers because they're fronting all of the backend costs that used to be spread across 4 or 5 different services.