"Real Estate Agent" 10 years from now will seem as quaint as "Milk Man" or "Cobbler". A dead profession, disintermediated (finally) by the insanely efficient internet. A profession ushered into oblivion by piss-poor ethics, usurious pricing and really bad hair.
Google Real Estate: Who gets hurt?
Goliath can go anywhere he wants. Now he's decided that house and apartment listings look like a fertile plain.
Google's only getting started, according to Peter Zollman, founder of Classified Intelligence LLC.
Zollman sells consulting services to newspapers desperately trying to hold on to their display and classifieds business. While he said that Google Real Estate (drawing its data from four-month-old Google Base's well of "user-generated" listings) is "nothing new," it is a huge threat to publishers. He even wondered why it took Google months to adopt its own software tools to create such a mashup, when non-Googlers were doing so already.
"Google is a not a fly-by-night company," he told me in an interview. "They're a long-term player."
"Improved information flow (of listings) will reduce inefficiencies in the market and ultimately cut brokers' commissions or eliminate them entirely," Jackson wrote
April 10, 2006
Good morning realtors of the world. I've got three words for you today: Google Real Estate
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4 comments:
If they make it like priceline.com it will be like what happened to alot of airline phone reservation people who lost their jobs to computer reservation systems. It might lower the cost of real estate transactions significantly allowing people to shop for homes, create appointments to tour open houses evenings or weekends or have special hourly workers open lockboxes, shop for settlement attorneys and preprinted contracts, and to save about $30,000 in broker's commisions for a minor inconvenience. Years ago people switched to self serve gas stations instead of full serve as they offered cheaper gas.
Once the information is out on the internet, then there will be a few left to do the leg work of showing the houses, etc. for an hourly fee, as it should be.
Some agents may see the change, and start doing this instead of waiting around hoping to get new listings.
The power is with us, the owners/sellers. First, stop paying the "buyers agents". If buyers are to stupid to use the internet, they can pay an hourly "search fee" to someone who can.
Next, don't list with RE agents, since they live and die by getting listings. Without listings, there is no income, esp. if sellers stop offering "buyers agents" fees.
It's all about information flow. I see realtors all the time who run their businesses like a local "gossip network" in which they try to line up buyers and sellers *before* officially listing it so they can double dip. The problem is the seller is hosed because they don' get exposed to the market, and the buyer thinks they "got a deal" without having to compete.
But...but...but...what will happen to this lovely lady?
It's true. The ethics were shaky to begin with and really took a spill off the cliff with this last run-up in prices.
I fell sorry for the handful of honest, decent realtors out there.
But at this point they really are just a handful - too few to save this "profession" from the disgrace it so rightfully deserves.
It DOES seem that somewhere in their training they were encouraged to lie and decieve and only the most stalwart bucked that trend.
Good riddance.
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