When all you have is a hammer — disintermediate the bums!

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I live in an amazing world, which is to say a world by which I am continuously amazed, without boundary or graduation.

Here’s an example: I cannot for the life of me understand why National Association of Realtors President Pat Combs has not called me personally to ask me to come to Las Vegas for the convention to tell the NAR what it’s getting wrong.

Now you may think that’s an amazing hubris on my part, but in fact I am the obvious candidate for the job. Redfin.com’s Glenn Kelman is the only plausible alternative, but he is too much at odds with traditional real estate to qualify. I, on the other hand, am — on paper at least — the pot-bellied poster-child of the NAR — GRI, ABR, CRS the hard way. Add to that that I have spent many hundreds of hours detailing what’s wrong with the NAR, and have built a national platform from with to promulgate those arguments and, from my point of view — from Planet Cluetrain — the invitation should have been forthcoming months ago.

But there my amazement does not end. For, upon receipt of such an invitation, I would have to decide what to do about it. It wouldn’t be an easy choice. I think I might love to do it — on my birthday, no less — particularly if the audience were very hostile. But I don’t see that there could be any enduring benefit to it. If Pat Combs had ever even heard of the Cluetrain, she wouldn’t have any need to hear from me.

A nicer way, and I could do this easily enough, would be to go in and talk about the exciting world of Web 2.0 — and it seems likely to me that someone will be doing just that at some breakout session or another. And this will be just as stupid and pointless as the Inman BloggerDoggles, where earnest, well-intentioned people try to talk about community while a horde of congenital note-takers scribbles down tips on how to fake sincerity to snag more leads.

“The world sorts itself out” is what I said to a BloodhoundBlog contributor as an antidote to a topical indignation. I don’t need to be invited to the NAR. The NAR will come to me, one mind at a time, and we will each of us go to learn from Jim Duncan, when the moment is right, or Dan Melson or Daniel Rothamel or Jay Thompson. There’s room on the Cluetrain for everyone — and there is no way to bar anyone from catching a ride — or catching a clue.

This is my answer to everything: Disintermediate the bums! I don’t want to talk to the NAR, what I want is to live in a time where the NAR no longer matters in any way at all. This is an attainable objective, and this — what I am doing right now — this is how it will be attained. This is why they should have invited me long ago, and, amazingly enough, this is precisely why they have not. Vesuvius growls and grumbles and still they think what we are doing is graffiti.

“When all you have is a hammer,” we are taught, “everything looks like a nail.” That reads as a promise of prowess, and it only seems misplaced in the short-run. Over the long haul, treating every problem as the same one problem can have salutary consequences, with these nets we traverse as the best proof yet.

But the sentence also reads to me as a confession of weakness, and my instant reaction is to say, “When all you have is a hammer, use it to pound out a bigger hammer.”

This is where BloodhoundBlog is headed. You can see it in our numbers if you pay attention, but the numbers don’t even matter. We are sui generis, a thing apart, a universe unto our own. We stand on the shoulders of giants, as does everyone, but we stand tall on the shoulders of giants. We hammer harder, longer, louder — and, invited or not, we will be heard.

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