Herd dinosaurs? Not me, but what should we do instead?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Responding at some length to a comment from Charles Woodall:

> Changing the real estate business in the grassroots effort you suggest would be a slow process as well.

I know you’re not joking with me, but are you aware of how quickly the real estate industry is changing right now? None of this is happening through the NAR cartel.

> it would literally take thousands or ten of thousands of people to make it happen.

Shazam! Here we are. BloodhoundBlog is just a part of the changes taking place, but we talk to tens of thousands of unique souls every month.

> We already have a powerful trade organization in place, so getting a few hundred people involved would be easier, in my humble opinion.

You’ve already talked about how it was virtually impossible for you to make an obviously necessary change. The NAR exists to milk agents, consumers and the taxpayers, in that order. It will not even try to do anything else until it is much too late to make any difference.

> While your thoughts are noble, and I agree on several points, until leadership in REALTOR associations on the local and state level want to move into the 21st century, it just isn’t going to happen.

It’s not going to happen.

> Folks such as yourself getting involved will be required.

First, people like me will never get involved with the NAR. I personally am deeply philosophically opposed to what I consider to be the criminal objectives of the NAR, but even someone less philosophically fastidious is going to achieve far better results by improving his own mind, rather than wasting vast amounts of time trying to herd mental dinosaurs toward a future they despise and think they can avoid.

There are actually three issues that you are raising.

The first is that I — or someone like me — would be profited by participating in any sort of committee work, even if it didn’t involve lobbying the state to point its guns at innocent people. Assuming a committee can learn anything at all, it cannot learn any faster than its slowest member, and committees seem to me to be especially attractive to the slow-witted.

The second is that the committee itself would do better work if it were to recruit someone like me as a member. I believe this is false. Committees thrive on teamwork, where good entrepreneurs work alone or in clear hierarchies. My expectation would be that a normal badly-functioning committee would achieve substantially worse results if it recruited a true entrepreneur. The enterpriser would convey in a thousand subtle ways his disgust with the formalized indolence of the process, and the other members would trip over themselves trying to throw obstacles in the path of the entrepreneur.

And the third is the meta-issue of whether a committee or something like it is even the appropriate means for pursuing an objective. In the world of commerce, the divil takes the hindmost. In the world of charity, people dither away time and money as a way of escaping the rigors of commerce. What you are arguing for, ultimately, is “work” I thing should not be done at all.

I started this meta-debate because I think that both occupational licensing and the NAR cartel are doing a poor job of protecting consumers from stupid and/or inexperienced and/or larcenous practitioners. I have other issues with the NAR cartel — that it is a cartel, for one, and that it seeks to deploy the power of the state to criminalize what would otherwise be perfectly morally righteous activity, an example being real estate brokerage by banks. But even ignoring the criminal objectives of the NAR cartel, I can’t think of a thing it does that it should be doing, nor can I think of anything it does as well as even a mediocre business would do it. Arguably, it could be effecting the consumer protection function I am anxious to see fulfilled — except it doesn’t. Given its composition and objectives — to milk agents, consumers and the taxpayers, in that order — it can’t.

I don’t know that the NAR will go away — organizational theory argues that it won’t — but it will be (and already is) progressively less important to the future of the real estate industry. The people who are moving the industry into the future are outside of the NAR sphere of influence, and this trend will accelerate. And the NAR itself is unable both to sustain its current power base and change in the ways it must to remain relevant. We’ll still be paying dues to it for years to come, I fear, but its day is already done.

The question I’m interested in: Can the full-service real estate brokerage business* find ways to defend its value proposition in this changing marketplace? The answer won’t come from a committee but from the kinds of entrepreneurs you will find writing, reading and commenting here.

(*edited for clarification as discussed in comments below)

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

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