Category: Disintermediation (page 40 of 43)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The trouble with cops is that they make you feel safe when you’re not. Instead of attending to your own security on your own dime, you expect Officer Vengeance to swoop in and save you, like Batman with a beer-belly. Never happens, but we never stop insisting that it can, that it will, that it must!

I think the real estate laws tend to work the same way. In reality, every minimum standard becomes the de facto maximum standard — and the minimum standard in real estate is outrageously low. Yet consumers are convinced that licensing and license enforcement are sufficient protections — Captain America with a clipboard — for the biggest asset they own.

This is a mistake, and, arguably, it is also the root cause of all the problems affecting the real estate industry. The NAR campaigned state-by-state for licensing laws not to protect the consumer but to protect its own membership from “unfair” competition. The NAR is a cartel in the sense that real estate licensing laws exist to limit competition, thus to sustain artificially high prices. In naked essence, the laws consumers think are protecting them exist to fleece them instead. This is true of every sort of commercial regulation — and this is why regulation is sought by the established firms in a particular line of business in the first place.

An obvious first place for the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to start, in attempting to fix what ails the real estate industry, would be to deregulate everything. If Chester the Barber wants to tape pocket listings to the mirror behind his chair, let him. If Sellsius° wants to do more than advertise other people’s listings, let them. Caveat emptor, of course, but let the buyer beware in full cognizance that due diligence and care are all the protection an emptor or venditor can ever have in any commercial transaction. The courts might make you whole after you are injured, but your beer-bellied Batman is always scarfing donuts when you need him the most.

But: This won’t happen. Real estate licensing requires so little training that Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Continuing from a comment from Ardell:

You live in a world where everyone pretty much HAS to be a Realtor to sell residential real estate, as I did for most of my career.

That may be true right now, I don’t know for sure. I know there are non-NAR members who have access to ARMLS, but I don’t know that any of them are also real estate licensees. My expectation, about which more below, is that the AAR would cave at once if a non-NAR-member licensee applied for full access to ARMLS — if they raised any objection at all.

I have nothing against Realtors at all. I do have something against buyers not having the right to a basic conversation about compensation the same as sellers.

But of course they do have this right. The conversation might not go very far with most agents, but we advertise the idea at the top of our home page.

I do have a something against buyers being “procured” for the benefit of the seller.

I do, too, but buyers have to be willing to bring complaints when they are abused. Nothing cures bad behavior like seven-figure judgments for agency violations.

I do have something against an organization who has not taken a stand on this issue to the benefit of the buyer consumer, and who still feels the seller pays the fee after all these years.

The NAR is sclerotic. This is not news. The important point is that there is no obstacle to individual practitioners and brokers doing better.

Here’s an example: We had an Article 16 complaint earlier this year. In the neighborhoods we farm, we broadcast our announcements — open house invitations, sold cards, etc. This work is done by independent contractors of a subcontractor, and both because training is difficult to effect and because I did not want to experience errors of discretion, I interpreted Article 16.2 in the broadest possible terms: They were to skip only houses with “No Soliciting” or “No Trespassing” signs. They had no knowledge of the MLS, and they should not make any presumption about the presence or absence of real estate marketing Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In comments to a post at Rain City Guide, new agent Seattle Eric wrestles with Lady Ardell over what is and is not broken in real estate representation.

Ardell offers an amazingly detailed list, at which I can only marvel. I’ve had run-ins with less-than-perfect agents, but my common experience is the opposite — very thoughtful, experienced, conscientious people. I’ve heard a lot of stories about bad agents, but I almost always assume that stories improve with age, with retelling and with the transfer of retelling rights from the original raconteur to who knows how many raconteurs-by-proxy. We are not liars, as a species, just very good storytellers.

(Even so, bad agent stories are a good education. Love is hard but hate is easy. Most of your clients will love you if you do nothing they hate, and bad agent stories are how they tell you what they hate.)

My beef with other Realtors has to do with their being lazy and complacent, rather than their being corrupt or stupid. Much of what I write about here consists of marketing ideas we are pioneering. You could argue that we are arming our own competition, but I know we are not. As good as the ideas we deploy are, no one in my market is copying them. That’s all you have to do by the time we’re done — monkey-see, monkey-do — but the agents are too lazy, too cheap or too clueless to jump on an intellectual bandwagon they exerted not one thought to create in the first place. Dinosaur is always on the lunch menu.

In the same respect, I am appalled by how how inept, technically, many Realtors are. Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato had a wonderful riff on how stupid e-Pro is — and people at ActiveRain argued with him about it. We live at the far right edge of this Bell Curve, but my assumption, always, is that agents I’ll end up working with will be very far to the left side.

In general, I think agents do way too much of what Ardell argues they no longer do enough Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

NAR Board of Directors, 1909

Point:

As it stands right now, MLS systems and data exist purely for Realtors and members. The public is more of an afterthought. This will continue to be true, unless people start to stand up and say, “I WANT MY MLS!”

Counterpoint:

Some may say that [David Barry’s] goal is not ethics or reform, but destroying the NAR and the privately-owned MLS’s so companies that do not share these goals, or, in some cases, even actively participate in the buying and selling of real estate, can use the privately held data (listings) for their own benefit and profit.

Those two arguments shoot across each other’s bow, but much of this debate does. Truly, the whole mess was started in 1908. It seems unlikely that it will be resolved by 2008.

I have much more to say about this…

Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…how does what you’re saying have anything to do with Zillow.com?

Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing