Author: Greg Swann (page 132 of 209)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I call it the Law of Somebody’s Dinner. Free market solutions to problems tend to work because entrepreneurs or investors won’t get to eat if they don’t. Government solutions tend not to work because government employees get paid the same — or even more — even if nothing works as advertised. Economists would call “Somebody’s Dinner” an incentive system, and predicting whether some proposed idea will work is a matter of evaluating the incentives — weighing the perceived attainable rewards against the anticipated costs.

This is why the existing reputation management sites for real estate agents tend not to work. The site itself has an incentive — traffic equals advertising dollars. The agents may perceive a reward in the form of a competitive advantage. But the actual end-users, consumers, do not perceive that they have anything to gain or lose, either from reporting agent activity or from perusing reports. In the case of reporting, the activity could only be seen as charity, doing good for others with no anticipated downstream return. Worse, consumers, especially buyers, are unlikely to make critical distinctions among real estate agents.

So why would I expect the kind of certification system we’re talking about to work so well that it could supplant the NAR in the minds of real estate consumers?

Because a very rigorous certification system would be a significant long-term marketing advantage to the certificants. Individual agents already try to market to the kinds of strengths certification would verify, but their efforts are too localized to have a significant impact upon public perceptions.

But if enough first-quality agents were to pursue certification, and if they were to market their certified status among their clients, we could achieve a critical mass that would eliminate uncertified agents from the mainstream of real estate transactions.

The incentive is the agent’s first, and only secondarily the client’s. In fact, consumers stand to realize great benefits by working with highly-skilled, scrupulously-ethical agents, but they only agree with that idea in the abstract, at most, for now.

But because certification brings agents a significant added marketing value, certified agents have a very strong incentive to promote the Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ll have more later, but of all the many reasons the NAR deserves to be disintermediated, perhaps the simplest and most obvious is that these congenital retards cannot catch the frolickin’ Cluetrain.

 
More viewpoints, pro and con, on supplanting the NAR:

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Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Minnesota Association of Realtors went on another foot-shooting expedition yesterday, again calling for paid-up members of the statewide trade group to quit the business so other paid-up members can earn more money. I made fun of them the last time they did this, and I could easily have another go at them tonight.

But: Here’s the thing: What good would it do? After money, criticism is the best gift you can have from the marketplace, but many people don’t know how to respect that kind of wealth. They suck at what they do and they intend to go on sucking, and if you point out what they’re doing wrong, they puff up into an outraged defensive posture and try to portray you as the bad guy.

Even worse, the NAR hierarchy seems to self-select for mental and moral midgets, mealy-mouthed morons, minds enmired in mush, utterly incapable of conceiving that the only emotion they inspire among the membership is a tepid sort of revulsion. There is no sport in making fun of them. It literally is like picking on actual retardates. It’s not funny, it’s cruel.

Plus which, criticism, even raucously funny criticism, is not what’s needed. Here is the full and final cure to the problem posed by the National Association of Realtors, along with every rancid state and local branch:

Supplantation.

Not replacement. We can’t get rid of it, no more than we can get rid of the cartel-creating real estate licensing laws the NAR foisted off on an unsuspecting public. We can’t kill this vampire, no matter how much blood-sucking havoc it wreaks. But we can rob it of all its power.

How? By supplanting it. Just as the NAR seeks to elevate Realtors — dues-paying members — above mere licensees, we can create another, higher organization to deprive mere Realtors of any valuable marketing cachet.

This is something the Council of Residential Specialists could have done, but it, like REBAC, is nothing more than a lap-dog of the NAR. The real estate broker’s level of licensing could have and should have meant something serious, but, if anything, it’s an even worse joke than Read more