Swanepoel’s Top 10 Real Estate Trends matter to me — and to real estate — quite a bit less than my own list of burning issues

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Stefan Swanepoel sent me a copy of his Top 10 Real Estate Trends Report, which was gracious of him, considering that neither me nor any of the Bloodhounds nor BloodhoundBlog itself are mentioned anywhere in the book — at least as far as I could detect on a cursory examination. I don’t mind, mind you. I’d be amazed if we were cited. That kind of attention is reserved for the likes of Sellsius and Agent Shortbus — the biggest little PR3 weblogs in real estate. Every pundit or entity even remotely connected to the official world of real estate honors us by ostentatiously affecting to ignore us. And: Even then: We care a lot.

I did surprise myself by actually cracking the book. I had it last year, too, but I don’t remember if I looked at it. And I don’t want to seem to be hyper-critical of Swanepoel’s effort. It ain’t for me, that much should be obvious. I can’t think of anything in the tome that strikes be as being either important or non-obvious — or non-trivial. The whole thing, and everything and everybody in it, seem like deck chairs on the Titanic to me — but so does everything else even remotely connected to the world of official real estate.

Here are the issues Swanepoel takes up:

• Nightmare on Elm Street: What if Your E&O Insurance No Longer Existed?
  If the tenth biggest issue in real estate is a FUD factor, we’re in better shape than we knew. Excellent reason for getting rid of the broker’s license, but, of course, that doesn’t come up.
• The “Real” Energy Crisis: Factors Shaping Housing Values and Development
  Predictions about energy are as reliable as predictions about the weather.
• Winning the Gold: Green Movement Gains Grassroots Support
  If we assume an energy problem, much of the green issue will concern money, not the environment. For now, I read it all as a fad.
• Information Highway Congestion: Too Much Traffic Creates a Virtual Parking Lot
  More FUD, in this case I suspect fuddy-duddy FUD. We are overwhelmed by information. Our only hope for salvation will come from Luddite real estate brokers who can’t spell.
• The Foreign Factor: The Global Arena Becomes Your Back Yard
  Real estate franchisors are expanding internationally if they’re not too busy going broke at home.
• Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Future of (a National) MLS
  A nationwide MLS system is only 900 civil wars away. No mention, of course, of getting rid of the co-broke, which would put 900 little Balkan dictatorships on the sidelines and enable actual capitalists to promulgate real estate listings in whatever ways prove profitable.
• Organized Real Estate Moves: New NAR Initiatives Could Change Industry
  The fourth most important issue in real estate is making believe that the NAR is not a criminal conspiracy against the consumer.
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Price Tag of Wall Street Greed and Stupidity
  The bad guys are everyone except the NAR and the real estate brokers.
• The Power of One: Online Tribes Become Power Players
  Twitterpated echo-chamber white noise. Karl Marx’s Labor Theory of Value implies that an ornate mud pie is substantially more valuable than a plain one. The same logic drives defenses of water-cooler chatter among Realtors: If you talk to a lot of people who can’t do business with you, you’ll make more money than if you talk to just a few people who can’t do business with you. This dysmeme is so widespread, it’s no surprise that it turns out to be Swanepoel’s number two trend in real estate.
• Life After (During) A Down Market: Cycles Are Part of the Real Estate Journey
  The real estate market has changed. Who knew?

Am I being too arch? Here’s my problem: Absolutely nothing that matters to me made Swanepoel’s list. That’s okay for him. They’re his deck chairs on his sinking ship. But it’s not okay for me, nor is it okay for the real estate business. We’re not going to solve our problems by trying to hustle foreigners on Twitter with faked environmental enthusiasm.

What’s the number one issue, now and always, in residential real estate representation? Vestigial sub-agency, in the form of the cooperating brokerage fee, is inescapably a betrayal of the interests of home buyers. There is nothing that we can talk about in real estate that matters more than divorcing the commissions. Even to entertain any other discussion, without first acknowledging the elephant in the room, is inherently deceptive.

What else? The broker/salesperson licensing scheme, along with the broker’s withholding tax safe harbor, puts brokers in the agent-exploitation business, not the real estate business. The tax issue wouldn’t matter if all real estate agents were independent operating entities. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t unite for shared-marketing purposes. But each agent would be his own man or woman when receiving compensation.

Better yet, get rid of licensing altogether. Idiots who misspell parochial as “piroquial” (an uncaught typo in Swanepoel’s book) are not to be trusted with any work requiring care, thought or attention to detail. We all know very smart Realtors, but, unless we are very dumb ourselves, we know far more who are so stupid as to beggar the imagination. There is nothing that those fools are doing that cannot be mismanaged with the same diligence by any other moron. Without the state’s imprimatur on idiots and outright thieves, the insurance companies would engage in actual oversight, and, at last, at least, the worst of us would not be able to ruin the financial lives of innocent, unsuspecting consumers.

An even better boon to consumers in general, in or out of the housing market, would be to put the National Association of Realtors out of the bribery business. The NAR issues vague platitudes about consumers, but its actual objective is to churn the real estate market in order to generate economically-unjustified transactions for its broker members. Taxes up, taxes down, tax credits here, new penalties there. None of it means anything except to jerk consumers around, rushing to buy before this incentive lapses, rushing to sell while that one is still in effect. The NAR is a criminal conspiracy against consumers. Our present economic nightmare is the fault of the NAR and its systemic bribery more than any other factor.

None of these things will happen any time soon, of course, and the issue that matters most to Americans is runaway government. The NAR couldn’t destroy the hosing market with bribes if the government had not usurped the power necessary to push innocent people around at gunpoint. But if we can’t dial the government all the way back to 1776, nor even back to 1789, it were well, at the least, to get government out of the real estate business altogether. Governments should never compete with private enterprise, but the intrusion of micro-managing government into every aspect of both real estate development and transportation has been an undiluted disaster. True environmentalism begins only by eliminating the force that is most persistently damaging to the earth: The state.

Five truly important issue are more than plenty. It’s sad to say it, but just about every business in the United States is at war with the consumer right now, and in league with the state. But our business is the worst among all of them, the first of the criminal conspiracies against innocent buyers and sellers, and the parasitic business that taught all the other Rotarian Socialists how to elbow their way up to the welfare trough.

If we’re looking for an issue that will really matter to the real estate business, and really matter to America, here it is: Until we embrace capitalism — actual, enduring freedom from pushing people around by force or being pushed around by them — we are the disease, not the cure.

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