I had email late last night night from Mark Nadel, author of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center white paper on real estate commissions that has been cited lately by the Freakonomics blog and by weblogs all over the RE.net:
Greg,
I wish I had discovered your BloodhoundRealty blog earlier. If so, I would have referenced you in many of the footnotes of my 75-page law review article (including almost 400 footnotes) criticizing the traditional broker commission rate structure. If and when you have the time, I would love to get any criticisms, corrections, suggestions, etc., that you (or any of your readers) might have to my piece.
It is posted [here] and has been recommended by the Freakonomics blog.
Keep up the good work and I will be including appropriate references to your work in the revised version of my article.
Take care,
Mark S. Nadel
That’s very sweet, and I hope he’s writing notes like this all across the enblogged globe, most particularly to Our Lady Ardell.
For my own part, I think we are about to witness a revolution. BloodhoundRealty.com is at a de facto flat fee for buyer representation right now, and we’ll be rolling the idea out in stages starting tomorrow. In the short run, I think we’re gong to take a lot of business. In the long run, I think the co-broke is going to settle down to a flat fee for everything or nearly everything — and from the high-end first. In other words, my view is that we’re buying a short-term advantage and we’ll have to be ready with even better ideas when the market responds.
This is where we’ve been since we’ve been here: If there is any room left in the real estate marketplace for personal-service representation, it will have to be insanely great personal-service representation. One of the things we’re always looking for, as a business strategy, is the way to attack on two flanks: We bring much better service and benefits at a much lower cost. Whichever argument you want to make against us, you’re already beat.
What’s left — three years out, five years out, ten years out? Insanely great Realtors, bottom-feeders and realty.bots. Everyone else will be in a different line of work. And real estate will at last work like a real business…
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, compensation for buyer representation, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate marketing
ardell dellaloggia says:
Funny you call me Our Lady Ardell. Did you know my school was named Our Lady of Angels?
October 17, 2006 — 9:41 pm