I had lunch today with Ed Robson of Robson Communities. This was something Tom Horton set up, and he’s been campaigning for it for months. I think maybe both Robson and I wondered what might be the benefit of such a meeting, and I certainly didn’t want to embarrass Tom by being underwhelming. I’m a Realtor, very proudly. Ed Robson is a demi-billionaire. There’s a difference.
All my dread was wasted. We talked about flat fee buyer’s brokerage, and Robson was so completely sold on the idea that he had me present it to his finance VP. Ed Robson is a life-long hard-charging salesman, and he simply loved the idea of screwing down hard on the big-savings-in-exchange-for-the-commitment. This is true closing, a rare phenomenon in real estate sales.
I walked them through how our wives might decide that we were moving, which is how things often work out for men (roof, fridge, garage, TV — what more do you need?). When I got home from the rest of my day, I posted a comment at Mike’s Corner touching on some of the same issues:
To be honest, I don’t even like locally-available consumer-level MLS access — not even our own. Some IDX systems provide more detail than others, but there is nothing like the kind of control that comes from having full access to hundreds of unique data fields. If you can’t search to a very short list of high-probability candidates, one of which is the home you will end up buying, what you have is not home search but a wish book — a wheel-spinning toy useful for no purpose except wasting your time.
If you’re doing a transcontinental relocation, you need more search power than you currently have available. At a minimum, you need a Realtor to feed you more rigorous results than you can get on your own. Moreover, you probably wouldn’t know how to do the search you want done, anyway. The idea that Realtors have lost control of the MLS is absurd. If you want to make that data dance the way I do, you have to do it as much as I do — if and when you have full access to it.
But the other end of this is that an hypothetical executive wife doesn’t need much from the MLS to pick out her next house. She might have picked it out years ago and is just waiting for it to come onto the market. This is why an $800,000 house may actually entail less labor than a $200,000 house — because the home search doesn’t have very much, if anything, to do with the MLS system.
In any case, I’m to the point where I’m creating evangelists wherever I go. We have to commit to ad space reservations tomorrow. I have another hot-topic column in tomorrow’s paper, so I should have no trouble getting someone to help me paint a target on my back…
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