Intermediaries always introduce the principal-agent problem. Friction is always the core product of a gatekeeper. Administrators, bureaucrats, brokers, and agents design manual systems. Manual systems become non-linearly complex and non-linearly expensive to operate as both regulation and data requirements have increased monotonically over time, especially after 2008. This friction creates revenue for the gatekeepers.

Fragmentation and forgetting are also features---fragmented systems require repeated aggregation and reconciliation across numerous counterparties per transaction. Inefficient processes are mandated to be repeated from scratch across every transaction. Lack of data memory forces full re-verification of title, appraisal, inspection, lien, and servicing data on every transaction.

If you buy a house today and try to sell it tomorrow, you have to totally start over and pay for everything again. This should be trivially easy to do, yet the current system makes it impossibly expensive. No service providers have the incentive to provide a better product at a lower cost. The absence of reputation tracking allows repeated use of low-quality vendors and intermediaries without market penalties. Bad actors thrive in the shadows of information asymmetry, protected by the same opacity that enables systemic extraction.