In my last post, I made the case that many of today’s old school brokers are Dead Dinosaurs Walking.
In the last couple of days, two things have happened that have me questioning that theory and its keeping me up at night:
- I learned that a intelligent guy I know, a programmer who actually works for Rent O Meter (a RE tech start up), bought his first house last week. He used an agent who was referred to him. He did not use the Web in his search process at all. He told the agent what he wanted and what he could afford and had no problem when every listing the agent showed him just happened to belong to the agent’s brokerage.
He bought one of those listings, the broker scored a 6% double whammy, our programmer friend could not be happier, he loves his agent and actually referred him to me. To add insult to injury, the broker’s Web site is really just awful. This transaction is straight out of 1983:
- Another friend, who is not connected to the business, read the post and pointed out that the asteroid that hit the Yucatan, blocking the sun and causing firestorms on a planetary scale, probably killed most of the dinosaurs in less than a year. If the widespread use of the Web is the asteroid that hit Real Estate, then the impact happened around Y2K. Its 8 years later and lots of business-as-usual brokers are still standing.
How is it that brokers who refuse to evolve can tough it out for 8 years while Tyrannosaurus Rex was well on his way to being a skeleton in the Peabody Museum within 12 months?
The first comment on that post said, “If I’ve heard ‘I’ve sold hundreds of houses this way and there is no reason for me to change now’ once, I’ve heard it 100 times.”
What if that is right? That somehow, despite all the evidence to the contrary (this Blog being Exhibit A), Real Estate is immune, or shielded somehow, from what the Internet has done and is doing to businesses as diverse as Travel Read more
