Bearing the sacred mantle of insolence in the Parliament of Whores: Win one of two free sets of BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs in “The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-scam of the week” contest!

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Q: What’s the difference between cows and Realtors?

A: When they get the urge to be milked, cows don’t fly to trade shows at their own expense, wandering from booth to booth with their udders out.

Well. I certainly feel vindicated. The RSSPieces clusterfrolic is further proof of the advice I gave about dealing with vendors a year ago:

1. Avoid hosted software systems
2. Avoid proprietary technology
3. Pursue commodity solutions — and prices

BloodhoundBlog has been vindicated much more than I expected this year. On issue after issue, we’re the only national real estate voice to be heard on the topic:

• The NAR cartel and how to supplant it
• Trulia.com’s butt-surfing of its own listing partners
• The attempted censorship of Vlad Zablotskyy by ePerks.com
• The vendorslut venality of Inman.com and Realtor magazine
• Realtor.com’s simultaneous betrayal of listing agents and its forfeiture of the preeminent position in real estate search
• The continued predation of Realtors and lenders by Chokepoint Charlies who bring nothing but their toll booths to the real estate transaction

In March, I noted that much of the RE.net had gotten in bed with Brad Inman. Minions of the NAR — I called them the “nice niche” and Teri Lussier is turning it into a meme — have made their incursions as well. The result is that, at the national level, we are the only consistent voice left for consumers and for the grunts on the ground, the people who actually do real estate — rather than strive to find new ways of milking Realtors and lenders of their income.

We are what we are, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I just didn’t expect to have the entire battlefield abandoned to us. Obviously we can more than bear the load. I worried for a while about Vlad’s Legal Defense fund, but we’ve more than covered what we’ve needed so far. For a time I was mildly dismayed that too much of the wired world of real estate seems, per Emerson, “to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression” — but that certainly doesn’t describe anything that happens here.

Real estate is a vendorslut industry, after all, built by Babbits and parlor-pink progressives who preferred pushing innocent people around at gunpoint to free enterprise. Inman.com and Realtor magazine are vendorslut enterprises, after all — the advertising is advertising and the editorial content is just more advertising. The Trulia.com’s and the Chokepoint Charlies are going to milk you every chance they get. All that is baked in the cake. And since so much of what we think of as being the RE.net is actually either originated directly by vendors or by their disclosed or undisclosed employees, there really is no cause for dismay. Their job is to hustle you, and your job, as you are wise, is to train your mind not to be hustled.

All that’s as may be — long term issues that we will take down one by one. In the mean time, this week brings us two Realtor trade shows, Inman Connect in San Francisco and StarPower in Orlando. Both will feature alleged informational content, but much if not all of this content will have been vendor-sponsored and vendor-dictated in one way or another. In fact, both shows — like the annual NAR Convention — exist to milk attendees of as much income as possible as quickly as possible — and the bovine victims of this milking are expected to schlep from booth to booth to surrender their hard-won income.

I hate every bit of this — could you have guessed? Courtesy of Russell Shaw, Cathleen and I will be at StarPower again this year, but our motive in going to anything like this is to dive for Black Pearls — ideas we can implement in our own way, ideally without the involvement of any vendors.

If you’re going to either of these shows, that’s one Bloodhound game you can run: Bring us your best Black Pearl — the best idea you pulled out of the show. Put your Black Pearl in a comment to this post. The best one will win a set of Unchained DVDs.

And here’s the other Bloodhound trade show game: Bring us the biggest scam. Not all vendors are sleazy gonifs, but plenty of them are. Show us the worst — supported by photos if you want. If you unearth the scabbiest scam, you’ll win a set of Unchained DVDs, too.

And: You just can’t make this shit up. As I was finishing this post, my email dinged with a GoogleBot: Inman “News” says: “All eyes on Better Homes and Gardens.”

Good grief!

 
Further notice: Ahem.

 
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