Yes and no. A real estate agent has traditionally filled several functions:

• Home-buying/selling process expert. Someone who knows the process of how to buy / sell a home, what to look out for, what's most important, and how to keep things moving.
• Community expert. Someone who knows the current state of the local market, has knowledge about the living experience in specific neighborhoods, understands common features of homes in the area that out-of-area buyers might not be aware of, and knows whats available for sale.
• Marketer and salesperson. Someone who can provide exposure to a house on the market, make it stand out, attract interested buyers, and get them more and more engaged until they're convinced it's the home for them.
• Negotiator. Someone with extensive negotiation experience that can best represent a buyer or seller's interests, getting the best price while not driving such a hard bargain that the deal explodes.

Each of these functions, with the exception of negotiation experience, is much less valuable in the information age. Informed buyers and sellers have a vast array of real estate tools and current information at their fingertips.

Who needs a realtor to tell you what homes are on the market when Trulia, Zillow, even Realtor.com provide a near-comprehensive search of all available properties? Why ask an agent that doesn't live in a neighborhood what it's like to live there when StreetAdvisor.com will give you experience info, demographics, and things your agent would never tell you, like crime statistics and pollution levels?

Why ask an agent what the market conditions are like when http://www.smartzip.com/ gives you a free home-value rating and full comparative market analysis for $30?

Selling your home? A single-property website through http://www.postlets.com/ or http://www.vflyer.com/ will provide you with just as much or more marketing exposure than 80% of agents are offering these days. Get a yard sign with the web address on it, pay a one-time fee to get the property listed as For Sale By Owner in the local MLS, and list it on http://www.forsalebyowner.com/, and you've provided your home with more exposure than what 95% of agents can provide.

Run a Facebook ad campaign targeted at women engaged or married between the ages of 25 and 35 in your area, and create a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign for the keywords "[neighborhood (not city) name] homes for sale", "[neighborhood name] properties", etc., and you are killing it in a way only a handful of agents per state can... at a fraction of the comparative price.

There are few things an agent can do for you that you can't do yourself. And from my point of view, the biggest problem is that many (most?) agents aren't doing these things to begin with! 90% of home buyers use the internet to search for homes, according to the NAR itself. If your agent can't tell you about what they're doing on Trulia and Zillow, if they can't tell you about advertising they're doing on Google, or if their website looks like it's from the 90s... run.

Agents who don't understand how the game has changed, and don't have the skills to offer you great service, are obsolete. They're for buyer / sellers who are ignorant or lazy.

But, agents who get it (and they do exist), are absolutely worth it. They have:

• the whole package of skills, not just what you have time to learn.
• years of experience, and the connections and inside knowledge (of which there is still some) in the market.
• a halo-effect of selling multiple properties, giving them greater ability to catch the eye of buyers and leverage online marketing.
• full-time availability to not just expose your property to buyers but keep them engaged and build relationships with them until they're ready to buy.

These agents will sell or help you buy a home more quickly, for a better price, and with much less time and effort on your part.

A full-service professional with well-trained skills that's specialized in an industry will never be obsolete. But we are seeing the end of part-time agents, agents unwilling to learn new skills, and people entering the profession for easy, get-rich-quick work.