Month: August 2007 (page 1 of 9)

by Jeff Brown

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

There’s been so much talk about what the National Association of Realtors (or Real – I – tors as often mispronounced) should be, is now, and/or should become, I finally couldn’t stay quiet any longer. This subject is as important to the industry, any particular agent or broker, or the public in general, as what color rag I use to check my car’s oil.

They’re surely an easy target with their latest, and some, (including me) would call their weakest PR moves. But who has ever taken them seriously? Pick a real estate related subject, any subject. What lasting or even temporarily lasting and meaningful change has emerged from the fruitless womb of NAR?

I would submit three — Nada, Zip, and None. The industry itself has made things happen from day one.

Whenever they’ve gone up directly against lobbies which actually wield real life political power, they lose far more than they win. And so many of their claimed wins were in the bag anyway. I know, as I’ve been forced to be a member since 1969.

Education? Are you on drugs? With exceptions that wouldn’t take up all the fingers on one hand, what they offer is embarrassing to thinking people. Want a for instance? Ask your cousin the Realtor about his blog, and watch the instantaneous RCA Dog look on his face. Want another one? The dropout rate of agents in any market, good or bad, is always high, as most of them couldn’t find their butts with two helpers, a map, and a GPS.

Having a discussion on which way the NAR should be going is almost, but not quite a waste of time. They’ve never stopped me from doing anything but using my Mac to access the MLS systems around the country. Why? Because they’re either to damn lazy to hire my 16 year old next door neighbor to make the changes, they’re apathetic, or they don’t want me using a Mac. It’s still a non-issue to me, as it’s just to easy to circumvent.

NAR has simply been a non-entity in my career.

I’ve taken one course Read more

by Kris Berg

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

What’s the issue here, really? I am speaking of the anti-NAR revolution at hand, of course. Is it:

1. The public’s poor perception of the profession and the professional? While some may argue that NAR, in their ongoing (and I will argue) oft-misguided yet well-intended attempts to be supportive of its members, has done more damage than good to our collective credibility, it is all too convenient to place blame entirely on their shoulders.
2. The standards, ethics, and professionalism of many agents which we find substandard and a drag on our consumer’s perception of value? Guilty-by-association is certainly a concern, even a reality, yet this applies to any career class.
3. Licensing standards which by their very nature serve not to limit entry to those who are competent but serve rather as an open invitation to anyone who can fog a peep hole? The tricky part here is that the skill sets which the truly great agents must possess are not testable; Entrepreneurship, moral and ethical resolve, devotion to hard work, business acumen, commitment to personal and professional evolution, a right-brain which not only coexists but works in harmony, with the left, and compassion for the client are all attributes which can only be demonstrated once given the opportunity to perform.

Lest I am accused of just having made a case for sending agent licensing requirements to the guillotine, let me assure you that this is not the case. I have had some pretty hideous plumbers in the past, and have even been to some really terrible doctors. While I will consequently not give my business to these poor performers again, I will still expect my next plumber or doctor to have met some minimum training standards. And I understand that these “credentials” are not a guarantee that they will be spectacular at what they do, but it is a starting point.

Ask not what your profession (or professional organization) can do for you. Maybe it’s time that each of us who has more than a casual concern for our reputation and our future survival ask instead what we can individually do for the profession. No cooperative of those claiming to be ethically, skillfully or attentively Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I call it the Law of Somebody’s Dinner. Free market solutions to problems tend to work because entrepreneurs or investors won’t get to eat if they don’t. Government solutions tend not to work because government employees get paid the same — or even more — even if nothing works as advertised. Economists would call “Somebody’s Dinner” an incentive system, and predicting whether some proposed idea will work is a matter of evaluating the incentives — weighing the perceived attainable rewards against the anticipated costs.

This is why the existing reputation management sites for real estate agents tend not to work. The site itself has an incentive — traffic equals advertising dollars. The agents may perceive a reward in the form of a competitive advantage. But the actual end-users, consumers, do not perceive that they have anything to gain or lose, either from reporting agent activity or from perusing reports. In the case of reporting, the activity could only be seen as charity, doing good for others with no anticipated downstream return. Worse, consumers, especially buyers, are unlikely to make critical distinctions among real estate agents.

So why would I expect the kind of certification system we’re talking about to work so well that it could supplant the NAR in the minds of real estate consumers?

Because a very rigorous certification system would be a significant long-term marketing advantage to the certificants. Individual agents already try to market to the kinds of strengths certification would verify, but their efforts are too localized to have a significant impact upon public perceptions.

But if enough first-quality agents were to pursue certification, and if they were to market their certified status among their clients, we could achieve a critical mass that would eliminate uncertified agents from the mainstream of real estate transactions.

The incentive is the agent’s first, and only secondarily the client’s. In fact, consumers stand to realize great benefits by working with highly-skilled, scrupulously-ethical agents, but they only agree with that idea in the abstract, at most, for now.

But because certification brings agents a significant added marketing value, certified agents have a very strong incentive to promote the Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ll have more later, but of all the many reasons the NAR deserves to be disintermediated, perhaps the simplest and most obvious is that these congenital retards cannot catch the frolickin’ Cluetrain.

 
More viewpoints, pro and con, on supplanting the NAR:

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Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Minnesota Association of Realtors went on another foot-shooting expedition yesterday, again calling for paid-up members of the statewide trade group to quit the business so other paid-up members can earn more money. I made fun of them the last time they did this, and I could easily have another go at them tonight.

But: Here’s the thing: What good would it do? After money, criticism is the best gift you can have from the marketplace, but many people don’t know how to respect that kind of wealth. They suck at what they do and they intend to go on sucking, and if you point out what they’re doing wrong, they puff up into an outraged defensive posture and try to portray you as the bad guy.

Even worse, the NAR hierarchy seems to self-select for mental and moral midgets, mealy-mouthed morons, minds enmired in mush, utterly incapable of conceiving that the only emotion they inspire among the membership is a tepid sort of revulsion. There is no sport in making fun of them. It literally is like picking on actual retardates. It’s not funny, it’s cruel.

Plus which, criticism, even raucously funny criticism, is not what’s needed. Here is the full and final cure to the problem posed by the National Association of Realtors, along with every rancid state and local branch:

Supplantation.

Not replacement. We can’t get rid of it, no more than we can get rid of the cartel-creating real estate licensing laws the NAR foisted off on an unsuspecting public. We can’t kill this vampire, no matter how much blood-sucking havoc it wreaks. But we can rob it of all its power.

How? By supplanting it. Just as the NAR seeks to elevate Realtors — dues-paying members — above mere licensees, we can create another, higher organization to deprive mere Realtors of any valuable marketing cachet.

This is something the Council of Residential Specialists could have done, but it, like REBAC, is nothing more than a lap-dog of the NAR. The real estate broker’s level of licensing could have and should have meant something serious, but, if anything, it’s an even worse joke than Read more