This virtual real estate broker hereby declares freedom. Freedom from the traditional bricks-and-mortar business models that worship the institutions of the real estate industry. I have always been an iconoclast who is bored by the weekly office manager giving his inane speech about “get out there and get those listings.” I have always been sensitive to lies being clothed with smiles and the we’re-here-to-help-you pep talks by brokers who fully intend to get rich off all the ignorant agents they are using.
The very institutions in the real estate industry that claimed to take our membership money to help us . . . have become behemoths intent on supporting their own executive salaries and bonuses. Associations created to protect consumers have become massive organizations that manipulate and deceive the very people they claim to protect.
Like the saying, “Trick me once, shame on you, trick me twice, shame on me,” agents all across the United States seem to refuse to take responsibility for their own futures. As if they had no discernment at all, behaving like lambs to the slaughter, they glibly obey their traditional brokers and their associations, going to the office everyday like automatons, attending unproductive meetings, standing around the water cooler, chit chatting about some property that another broker sold, making a couple of cold calls, looking at the MLS online and surfing the Internet for hours under the guise of working.
Of course, they would defensively deny all this, but it is far too common today in the big offices. Not just big offices, but many offices around the country, even small ones. Greg Swan is quite right (talk about an iconoclast) when he wrote, “What we teach is independence, the recognition that you alone are the source and the sink, the alpha and the omega of your knowledge, of your business and of your success or failure.” See The Unchained Epiphany. Read more