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It may have escaped your notice, but if you look very carefully you might just see a tiny mention in the press about an upcoming wedding down Westminster way. What's this got to do with estate agency? Once upon a time, when a couple sent out invitations to their wedding, it was customary to include a little list of things they'd appreciate to help them on their way to a new life together. This, of course, was because if they didn't, when they returned from their honeymoon and entered their front room they'd be faced with a pyramid of beautifully-wrapped, boxes, festooned with bows and ribbons and every single one of them containing ... a toaster. But now we spend more time online than in the real world (or so it sometimes seems), the Wedding List has gone virtual, too.

And that's good news for Mr and Soon-To-Be-Mrs, because thinking about and creating a wedding list, whether beautifully printed in copperplate or photocopied on the office Xerox could sometimes be quite hard work. And so could going out and buying it. Nowadays, thanks to a discreet little link somewhere on the card inviting us to a wedding, we can choose our gift online, pay for it, have it wrapped and even delivered with just a few clicks of our mouse. Now there's efficiency for you.

And what's all this got to do with estate agency? We want our own home. We've been brought up to want our own homes and come hell or high water we're going to have our own homes. Hell, though, used to be tramping round estate agency after estate agency after estate agency, looking at property details posted in the windows and sitting across the desk from agent after agent after agent, telling them about your requirements. High water used to be the Friday evening thud of your local freebie paper hitting the doormat, the rustle of pages while hunting down the property section ... and that sigh of disappointment at the news that contracts had been exchanged on the property you really, really wanted the day before yesterday.

But those days are over. Long gone, thanks to the internet. Let's go on holiday: Airline ticket? Click - bought. Hotel room? Click - booked. Travel insurance? Click - done. Let's buy a house: Four-bedroom detached house with conservatory, huge garden and field views? Click - Sorted.

The launch of Rightmove in 1999 and its dominance of the property search market since has dictated that the leading property site and its competitors such as Zoopla, Prime Location and Findaproperty now account for over 90% of all property searches. In fact the top five property portals attract over 10 million unique buyer visitors each month. Quite a few more than visit estate agency offices anymore. That's why, according to Ordnance Survey, nearly 10% of all such branch offices have closed down since 2008.

But that's not where the property industry revolution ends. Now that buyers rely on online resources for their next home, so can sellers. Simply, if buyers are shunning face to face visits then what's the logic in these agents maintaining the high costs of town centre offices which, naturally, just result in high selling fees being charged in order to pay for them? Well the answer is that there is no longer a logic or justification in paying a company an average of 3000 to sell your home just because it chooses to occupy lots of flash offices (that you won't ever go in to).

- So online is the future of property sales. - Online agencies are more accessible. - They guarantee more advertising exposure. - Their fees are a fraction of what you'd pay a high street agency. - It's a perfect modern marriage: estate agent and homeowner. - And we wish them both much happiness together.