Zillow.com at the Dawn of the Age of Abundance: Working for free is not a crime, trying to forbid it is . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid (more INTx evidence). One of my favorite books was Voyage From Yesteryear by James Hogan.The plot turned on the conflict between an economy like ours, based on scarcity and hoarding, and a radically different economy based on abundance and sharing. At the time the book was published, the latter economy would have seemed wildly utopian to a lot of people. But there were others who saw the Singularity on the horizon and understood that Hogan’s vision was one way it might play out, in the near term.

By now, of course, Hogan’s ideas don’t seem very radical at all. There are still a great many economic goods stored behind lock and key. But we are seeing more and more goods, especially intellectual values, delivered at no cost, often with no form of “monetization” at all. I wrote about this in my first BloodhoundBlog post and later in a post about disintermediation in the for-pay information business.

The interesting question I asked then is even more interesting now:

How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free?

This is a question that Zillow.com’s new Q&A feature asks, and it’s a question that seems to be uppermost in the minds of members of The Arizona Board of Appraisal.

But here’s an angle that may not have occurred to you: When Zillow.com introduces a potential buyer to a Make Me Move seller, it is engaging in the essential act of real estate brokerage. Why isn’t this “illegal,” much as the Board of Appraisal is attempting to claim that Zillow’s Zestimates are “illegal” appraisals?

The answer: Because Zillow is not accepting or anticipating compensation for engaging in real estate brokerage. The Babbitts who wrote the real estate laws did so in the hope of creating a cartel, with correspondingly higher fees, by forbidding non-licensees from listing and selling real estate for compensation.

This is a criminal conspiracy against the consumer, the use of the coercive power of the state — guns and prisons — to forbid consumers and vendors from trading freely by their own free choices. All occupational licensing laws take this form, to limit access to some industry, trade or profession to a politically-favored minority at the expense of the consuming public at large.

The political “cover” behind these laws are loose standards, laxly enforced, that allegedly “protect” the consumer. What the consumer is not “protected” from are the corresponding higher prices made possible by the cartel.

How do “business people” get away with this? The “politically-favored minority” is small but noisome, where the “consuming public at large” is vast but indifferent. Attorneys get soaked by doctors just as much as you do, but they make more by limiting your access to para-legals than they lose by their own lack of access to nurse-practitioners.

The cute part is, the Babbitts who wrote these anti-consumer, anti-capitalist occupational licensing laws never once foresaw that someone might come along and do the allegedly “regulated” activities for free. Brokering real estate for free does not require a license. Performing any of the activities associated with real estate brokerage does not require a license — provided the work is not done in the expectation of compensation.

This is obvious, if you stop to think about it: How else to explain the activities of FSBOs and BUBBAs? What is not obvious, after so many decades of these idiotic, Rotarian Socialist occupational licensing laws, is that everyone has the perfect legal and moral right to engage in almost any “licensed” activity for free. Rotarian Socialism is really a gutless, camouflaged form of National Socialism — government control of putatively privately-owned enterprises — but America is still a free country.

This dumb stunt against Zillow.com is a first shot across the bow, but consider that Iggy is coming to town. They’ll be licensed, but they will list your home in the MLS for free. Will the Babbits try to outlaw free competition? And then there’s Zillow.com, and who knows whom on the horizon, actively engaged in real estate brokerage for no compensation whatever.

In the aftermath of the Zillow 5 release, I saw a lot of commentary that struck me as being totalitarian. If you don’t like your neighbors bitching about your lawn, you can either mow it or cultivate indifference. If they bitch about your lawn on the telephone, on a radio call-in show, in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper or on Zillow.com, they are still engaged in free speech. Not “constitutionally-protected” speech. The Constitution — which turns out to have been printed on cheap rubber anyway — is at best a map of reality. Your neighbors have the moral, political and legal right to bitch about your lawn because they are reasoning, recollecting organisms.

The human mind cannot be outlawed. But the less-gutless champions of Socialism have demonstrated repeatedly that you sure can pile up a whole lot of corpses trying to outlaw the human mind.

I do not believe that the people who mutter about how they would like to censor Zillow.com — or other Realty.bots — or other vendors of free abundance — are advocates of mass murder or police states or random, routine violence against our hard-won political rights. But, at the same time, I think they have every good reason by now to know the nature of the dogs they would let slip, so there is no rational justification whatever for their muttering, nor any plausible rationale. People may enunciate facts or opinions you would rather not hear, or rather not have heard by others, but when you pick up a gun to try to silence them — or when you entreat your legislator to pick up that gun — you become the enemy of civilization…

< ?php include("Zapraisails.php"); ?>

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing