Category: Technology (page 42 of 60)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So someone, somewhere in the alphabet soup of Realtor associations is selling my email address — or perhaps just giving it away. Realtors all over Phoenix are watching an idiot’s spam-fest, as one clueless victim after another tries to escape the spam spiral started by an agent who seems not to know that we discover properties for sale in the MLS system — that this is what the MLS system is for.

This by itself is nothing. I get at least a thousand spam emails every day. Moreover, I know that a lot of people in my profession get painfully flustered when they sit down at a computer — so worried they’ll make a mistake that they cause a disaster instead.

But I am sick to death of being “led” by morons.

Witness:

• ZipForms does not work. It is crap software written by crap minds, with its bugs exceeded only by its omission of rational options. It was rammed down our throats by idiots at the AAR who obviously do not themselves use it. And yet, come the start of the year, we will have no choice but to use this piece of garbage — a fate which includes the vast legions of the flustered and the flummoxed.
• And because ZipForms has not been a big enough disaster, the AAR is now preparing to ram a piece of transaction-processing software down our throats — which will almost certainly also be a piece of buggy Windows-centric crap.
• The idiotic gateway software in our idiotic MLS system has never worked in Safari for the Macintosh. We’re getting rid of that crap vendor, thank god, but it is of a piece with the way the chefs of the alphabet soup have operated, that nothing they have promoted, until now, worked properly on the Macintosh.
• They spam me, and they sell or give my email address to spammers — and they charge me hundreds of dollars a year to deliver my inbox up to this rape.

I don’t care that other people don’t thrive at my wavelength. That’s understood. But I do care that they use power I never ceded to them to Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m behind on these, but this is a good time to catch up. This is my column from the Arizona Republic from last week.

 
Real estate representation has never been about information brokerage

As I write this, the National Association of Realtors is holding its annual convention at the Venetian Hotel and Conference Center in Las Vegas. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the trade group, a cause for celebration.

But the NAR is also embroiled in a years-long anti-trust suit brought by the United States Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. Real estate buyers and sellers are steadily migrating to the world-wide web as their primary communications medium, even as the housing market is suffering through an extended downturn in many parts of the country.

Of the challenges facing the NAR, perhaps the greatest is finding a path to relevance in the internet age. The group’s own statistics demonstrate that a steadily increasing percentage of home buyers and sellers are conducting their search for real estate information and representation on the web.

This internet-focused client base can be significantly more tech-savvy than many Realtors, with agents constantly racing to catch up. At the same time, Realtors’ presumed traditional value proposition, access to MLS listings, has been obviated by on-line MLS systems and nascent Realty.bots — venture-capital-funded internet start-ups devoted to delivering real estate information.

In fact, truly valuable real estate representation has never been about information brokerage — a fact both the Realtors and the Realty.bots seem to be slowly discovering.

The value a Realtor brings to a home seller is not the MLS listing, which is at best an administrative function. A skilled listing agent should advise sellers on pricing, preparation and presentation — the factors that get skillfully-marketed homes sold when no other houses are selling.

The best advice a buyer’s agent can provide to his or her clients comes not in a stack of MLS listings but in specific tactics to deploy during negotiations, inspections and throughout the escrow process.

Whether the NAR can sustain relevance into the twenty-first century remains to be seen. But, even though consumers may find Read more