Dinosaur is always on the lunch menu...





The best thing about Bloodhounds is the soft, supple skin along their necks and jowls.
Dinosaur is always on the lunch menu... If you're really not a working Realtor, this might not make a whole lot of sense to you. Even so, you're free to read on if you want. I conceal nothing, ever. This is from email I sent to a few friends and clients: We had whiny crybaby-mail from a bigfoot Phoenix Realtor earlier this week. His complaint was that we show too little respect for our fellow practitioners on our web site. Contrast that with this item, from Redfin.com's web site: 81% of our customers said service was "much better" or "better" than what they got from traditional agents Redfin is in the business of doing absolutely nothing for its buyers. It's state-of-the-art disintermediated real estate. How bad are traditional Realtors? 81% of Redfin's customers say they're worse than nothing. Caveats abound, of course, not the least of which is that Redfin will rebate up to two-thirds of the buyer's broker's commission. But if Realtors don't want to yield on price, then – ahem! – obviously they have to deliver on service. Or they could do neither and whine about the awful injustice of the free market. But dinosaur is always on the lunch menu... We've also had complaints about the way we distribute promotional material. On the one hand, you could view this as a misunderstanding of the 'general announcements' provision of NAR Code of Ethics Standard of Practice 16-2, in which event, here are the policy instructions we deliver to each one of the sub-contractors who do this work for us. But on the other hand, Realtors too often seem to the public to want to get paid for doing nothing. Complaining that consumers might discover better business models is the polar opposite of guarding the public's – and one's own clients' – interests. That's as may be. We are as professional and as cooperative as we can be with our fellow Realtors when we are working together on a transaction. But we are fierce competitors for unrepresented buyers and sellers. We are always thinking of new and better ways to serve our clients' interests, and we proudly tell the world when we come up with a new idea. We are re-inventing the idea of full-service real estate – not to compete against traditional Realtors, but to compete against the no-service bottom-feeders and RealtyBots like Redfin. But we also strive to help competing Realtors as much as we can. Like this: We will let you know when we are doing a broadcast distribution to promote a listing, so that, if you have a listing in the same area, you can plan your marketing efforts accordingly We don't dual agency at all, even though our marketing efforts generate many inquiries from unrepresented buyers; we are eager to cultivate relationships with agents from other brokerages to whom we can refer these buyers We sell our properties to nine decimal places; the web sites we build for our listings are as close as we can get to being canonical, and we plan to get a lot better; having that site to show off to friends and family is a significant added-value for your buyer We host extremely well-attended open houses; we would like to have agents from other brokerages run and manage some of these open houses, to avoid dual agency issues The bottom line is that, while we intend to compete for every dollar we can earn, by the very nature of what we are doing, there will be many, many dollars we will have to dish off to other practitioners. If you want to participate in this, say so. We will make our announcements only to Realtors (or perversely-interested others) who opt-in, so if we don't hear from you, you won't hear from us. Well, not until we come to eat you for lunch, at least... Very Best, Greg Swann, ABR, CBR, CRS, E-Pro, GRI Realtor, Designated Broker BloodhoundRealty.com Vox: 602-740-7531 \| Fax: 602-504-1353