ARRGGHHH! I would love it if the PAR/AAR/NAR would stop taking my money, but, if they won’t do that, could they at least manage to get the hell out of my way?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So someone, somewhere in the alphabet soup of Realtor associations is selling my email address — or perhaps just giving it away. Realtors all over Phoenix are watching an idiot’s spam-fest, as one clueless victim after another tries to escape the spam spiral started by an agent who seems not to know that we discover properties for sale in the MLS system — that this is what the MLS system is for.

This by itself is nothing. I get at least a thousand spam emails every day. Moreover, I know that a lot of people in my profession get painfully flustered when they sit down at a computer — so worried they’ll make a mistake that they cause a disaster instead.

But I am sick to death of being “led” by morons.

Witness:

• ZipForms does not work. It is crap software written by crap minds, with its bugs exceeded only by its omission of rational options. It was rammed down our throats by idiots at the AAR who obviously do not themselves use it. And yet, come the start of the year, we will have no choice but to use this piece of garbage — a fate which includes the vast legions of the flustered and the flummoxed.
• And because ZipForms has not been a big enough disaster, the AAR is now preparing to ram a piece of transaction-processing software down our throats — which will almost certainly also be a piece of buggy Windows-centric crap.
• The idiotic gateway software in our idiotic MLS system has never worked in Safari for the Macintosh. We’re getting rid of that crap vendor, thank god, but it is of a piece with the way the chefs of the alphabet soup have operated, that nothing they have promoted, until now, worked properly on the Macintosh.
• They spam me, and they sell or give my email address to spammers — and they charge me hundreds of dollars a year to deliver my inbox up to this rape.

I don’t care that other people don’t thrive at my wavelength. That’s understood. But I do care that they use power I never ceded to them to make my work harder, my life less pleasing.

ARMLS is a technology company, and we are blessed that the people running it are committed to bringing us a better software solution. On the home front, ARMLS needs to understand that it is a technology company, like it or don’t, and conduct itself accordingly.

AAR is not a technology company. Its software choices suck, and it does not have the staff to support them, anyway.

PAR/WVAR/SAAR/SEVRAR/etc. are not technology companies. They don’t know what they don’t know — and that’s fine. All they need to do is stop spamming and stop giving away email addresses.

The NAR is not a technology company. Realtor.com is a spectacular disaster for the actual working stiffs — who are already paying huge dues before they are accorded the privilege of buying back their own listings. Now the NAR is spouting off about new national search systems, as if they have any business in the software business.

I belong to ARMLS to gain access to the database. I share my listings with you, you share your listings with me. The whole idea of shared listings could be done better, but, all in all, it ain’t awful the way it is.

If I could belong to ARMLS without belonging to PAR, AAR, NAR — I would be gone in heartbeat. Different people like different things, and that is fine with me. I am smart enough to solve my own problems, so what I like is to be left alone.

Grand Poohbahs take note: No matter how many votes you got in your kangaroo-court election, no matter how many shiny pins you have on your lapel, you are not qualified to make business decisions for me. I wouldn’t trust you if you were smart — and, believe me, I know by the brain-dead decisions you make that you’re way over your head. I already hate being sucked into this cartel, but everything you do seems to make me hate you more. My private prayer and my public resolve is that you achieve the status of all labor unions in a free economy — a noisome but meaningless redundancy. I would wish you dead, but we all know that vampires cannot die.

Why write this here? Because nothing will make any difference anyway. Organizations run by smart people don’t need me to tell them how to do better. Organizations run by self-satisfied jackasses don’t intend to do any better. That’s why it’s necessary to call them jackasses, so they’ll have a huffy pretext to rationalize their smug inertia.

I’d like to say I feel better, but I don’t. Tomorrow there will be something new to incite my ire. Even so, in the long run it makes no difference. Computing technology is going to drive the idiots out of our business for good and all. It will start with the idiot agents — the ones who don’t learn to conquer their inane fear of computers. But it will take out the entire NAR cartel eventually. What will remain will be smaller, smarter, faster — and much, much cheaper — just like everything in a free economy. They might spam us now, they might afflict us with amazingly stupid software choices, but in the long run they’re done for.

Their demise cannot come soon enough for me.

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