Perhaps most critically, the industry suffers from fundamental confusion about who the customer actually is. Elephant Protocol focuses solely on borrowers, buyers, and sellers---the parties actually transacting in property. In the legacy system, the real customer of every service layer including MLS, Zillow, and mortgage brokers is the agent, not the transacting consumer. This misalignment creates systematic underservice of the parties who bear the costs while optimizing for the intermediaries who extract value.

The seller ultimately pays the agent through embedded commissions, so every fee structure is designed to extract from their proceeds invisibly. Products like Zillow remain fundamentally unimproved because they already meet the needs of their true customer---the agent who needs lead generation and transaction management tools. Consumer experience improvements that don't serve agent interests receive minimal investment, explaining why property search and transaction processes remain essentially unchanged despite decades of technological advancement.

Every layer in the transaction chain extracts value from the seller rather than creating value for the transaction itself. Title insurance, appraisals, inspections, and lender services all optimize for agent relationships rather than consumer outcomes. This creates systematic incentives for maintaining complexity and friction rather than streamlining processes, as simplified transactions would reduce opportunities for value extraction.

The result is an industry where the parties bearing the costs have the least influence over the processes, while the parties controlling the processes have the least stake in efficiency or cost reduction. This fundamental misalignment explains why market forces have failed to produce consumer-friendly innovations despite obvious opportunities for improvement.