{"id":1871,"date":"2007-08-31T00:10:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-31T07:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=1871"},"modified":"2007-09-15T10:27:11","modified_gmt":"2007-09-15T17:27:11","slug":"why-supplanting-the-national-association-of-realtors-can-work-where-other-reform-initiatives-have-failed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1871\/why-supplanting-the-national-association-of-realtors-can-work-where-other-reform-initiatives-have-failed\/","title":{"rendered":"Why supplanting the National Association of Realtors can work where other reform initiatives have failed"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But because certification brings agents a significant added marketing value, certified agents have a very strong incentive to promote the Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,30],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1871","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-marketing","7":"category-real-estate","8":"category-supplanting-the-nar","10":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1924,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1924\/supplanting-the-nar-can-we-get-to-a-better-quality-of-real-estate-representation-by-way-of-the-licensing-laws\/","url_meta":{"origin":1871,"position":0},"title":"Supplanting the NAR: Can we get to a better quality of real estate representation by way of the licensing laws?","author":"Greg Swann","date":"September 13, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Coming back to this, with my apologies for the delay. I realized I was never going to have time for the whole feast at one sitting, so I resolved to take it on one bite at a time. I want to examine some of the ideas and objections people have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Marketing"","block_context":{"text":"Marketing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/marketing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1880,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1880\/the-very-best-alternative-to-the-national-association-of-realtors\/","url_meta":{"origin":1871,"position":1},"title":"The “Very Best” Alternative to the National Association of Realtors","author":"Cooksquared","date":"September 2, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"There has been a lot of talk about how to fix the National Association of Realtors or even how to supplant the organization completely.\u00a0 As an outsider looking in, I have one simply question:\u00a0 Why are realtors paying good money to an organization that they hate?\u00a0 As an investor I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Marketing"","block_context":{"text":"Marketing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/marketing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1869,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1869\/supplanting-the-national-association-of-realtors-will-turn-it-into-a-toothless-vampire-overnight\/","url_meta":{"origin":1871,"position":2},"title":"Supplanting the National Association of Realtors will turn it into a toothless vampire overnight","author":"Greg Swann","date":"August 29, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Marketing"","block_context":{"text":"Marketing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/marketing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11202,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/11202\/agents-of-change\/","url_meta":{"origin":1871,"position":3},"title":"Agents of Change","author":"Glenn Kelman","date":"February 8, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Don Stewart posed an interesting question this morning about whether real estate is changing top-down from the broker or bottoms-up from the agent. In a post about how Redfin sees the real estate industry changing, Don suggested we had focused too much on the laws, the brokers, the MLS data\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Dual Agency"","block_context":{"text":"Dual Agency","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/dual-agency\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1870,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1870\/burn-down-the-mission-elton-john-reads-the-tumbleweed-manifesto-to-the-national-association-of-realtors\/","url_meta":{"origin":1871,"position":4},"title":"Burn Down the Mission: Elton John reads the Tumbleweed Manifesto to the National Association of Realtors","author":"Greg Swann","date":"August 30, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"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. \u00a0More viewpoints, pro and con, on supplanting the NAR: < ?php c2c_get_recent_posts(9999, \"%post_URL%\", '30'); ?> Technorati Tags: disintermediation,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Marketing"","block_context":{"text":"Marketing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/marketing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1949,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1949\/chicken-soup-to-social-responsibility-damn-im-a-paradox\/","url_meta":{"origin":1871,"position":5},"title":"Chicken Soup to Social Responsibility – Damn, I’m a Paradox","author":"Kris Berg","date":"September 18, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't pretend to understand the half of what Greg is trying to convey. This much, however, I will confess. Government is necessary, coalitions have value, and social responsibility is incumbent on all of us. Slam zoning laws if you must, but if, as a homeowner,\u00a0you suddenly find yourself sharing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Lending"","block_context":{"text":"Lending","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/lending\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}