Doug
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01:17:56 am on July 7, 2005 | # |
Scripting News: 5/1/2004: On the eBay of tomorrow, the vendor of the product you buy may never have even seen the product, maybe never have seen a prototype, all they knew as that a need wasn’t being met, and they took a chance on the idea. Manufacturing will be done where it’s most efficient. Things that used to require experts, like advertising, travel agencies, realtors, will decline.
Well, that’s a nice thought. Utter bullshit, but it’s nice to envision a future where we’re all capable of doing anything and everything through the power of technology, without ever having to resort to any sort of expert.
I can’t speak for the other experts Dave mentions, but I can tell you that he obviously doesn’t know much about what a REALTOR® does. We’ve already gone through a huge Internet-induced change in the real estate industry - and while it has dramatically impacted the way in which we work, it hasn’t done so in the way that Winer thinks it will.
Despite efforts to the contrary, it turns out that it takes a lot more to sell a home than simply listing it online. Pre-web, real estate agents were in fact the gatekeepers of information about houses; if you wanted to find a house to buy, you were pretty much obligated to contact a real estate broker. No one else knew what homes were for sale.
Today, 99.9% of all homes for sale are already online. According to the National Association of REALTORS 2002 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 41% of home buyers used the Internet to find a home. Contrary to Dave’s statement, those who used the Internet “were actually more likely to use a real estate agent to complete the home search and close the transaction.” Those who did use the Internet were generally younger, more affluent, and purchased more expensive homes.
Real estate agents are no longer the gatekeepers of information concerning what homes are for sale. That information is readily and easily accessible. Information for doing comparative market analysis, assessing the quality of schools, and other community information is also widely available online. Finding, collating, and analyzing that information, however, takes time.
Buying and selling a home is fundamentally a more complex sort of transaction than booking a flight, buying a book, or participating in an online auction for someone’s old underwear. The legal liabilities associated with selling a home in today’s market, where buyer’s and sellers frequently have to deal with issues of repairs, radon mitigation, and biological contaminants like mold, are significant. Write the contract incorrectly, and you could be facing an unpleasant time in court and financially crippling damages.
Marketing a home is also a more complex business than simply filling out a predefined form, snapping a few pictures, and posting the result to a web site. Homes are not interchangeable commodities that can be compared simply on hard statistics like price and square footage. Most homes have unique features that can dramatically influence how the home is viewed in the marketplace. Emphasizing the positive features while minimizing the less desirable ones is an art many sellers aren’t capable of handling on their own, and often aren’t even aware of.
Finally, buying or selling a home is often a very emotional process. Sellers love their homes and frequently aren’t able to view their property with a dispassionate eye. Buyers can, and do fall in love with a particular feature of a home that can blind them toward a particular home’s disadvantages. The results of a home inspection can trigger bitter feuding between buyers and sellers over seemingly trivial repairs, and possibly derail the entire transaction.
The role of the real estate agent in today’s market is encompassed by the areas I’ve outlined above. We act as researchers with a knowledge of the local market to do the research that buyers and sellers don’t have the time, inclination, or ability to do on their own. We act as consultants and guides to assist buyers and sellers in completing the legalities of the transaction correctly, to keep them out of trouble. We’re marketing consultants that help sellers put their homes in the best shape possible for sale, and assist them in effectively marketing the property. Perhaps most importantly, we act as a buffer between the buyers and sellers to decrease the emotion in the transaction and keep it moving forward toward the closing.
Technology has dramatically impacted the real estate industry, and will no doubt continue to do so. There are now, and have always been people who prefer to handle the transaction themselves, without an agent. Not surprisingly, however, it turns out that many people still very much want the aid and support of a real estate professional when involved in the largest personal financial transaction of their lives. I suspect that will continue for quite some time, no matter how sophisticated the technology we have access to becomes.
