Featured Us

Our Collective Schizophrenic Desperation

The real estate industry is not too unlike an organization living in a state of collective schizophrenia. Figuratively speaking, we are hearing voices that are not real.

Our hallucinations are mostly self-induced; the voices we hear are actually our own mumblings and business babblings disquised as forces we do not control.

I’m now convinced the real estate industry is delusional but not in the classic clinical sense of schizophrenia. Rather, we are deluded by the notion that what we are experiencing is beyond our control.

Since we don’t have an alternative point of reference for our delapitated and disfunctional (not too mention unprofitable) business models, we willing succumb to the voices that keep telling us all will be well and in time the market will return to normalcy.

We have come to actually believe there is a quick cure for our collective schizophrenia. We have long ago stopped taking the medications of self-reliance that can eliminate the voices and have instead turned to a generic drug that only fuels the illness and delays the inevitable.

The Great Delusional Grip

Franchisors continue their delusional grip on Broker-Owners, convincing them, mistakenly, that their brands are necessary as a market value proposition and to survival. To control the delusions and squelch the voices we pretend our economic survival can be optimized by merely changing our colors. We halucinate about technology solutions that magically produce profitability through Internet lead generation. The voices continue.

For a long time we have believed the pseudo voices and their message as they tell us to hold on, wait and believe that change is coming in the form of a market rebound that will resurrect the old models and their former but temporary profitability. But in reality are we trading our collective ability to transform our industry for the hope in the return of things past, of things long dead and gone? Have we surrendered our business sanity to the collective stupor of a beautiful mind syndrome.

It wasn’t long ago that I also experienced the paranoia that comes from thinking others control the business outcomes of my company and that there were forces out to get me if I didn’t comply with the verbal orders of quiet, shadowy personalities hiding under stairways and standing in dark corners, intimidating me as a Broker-Owner.

Dumping Market Meds into the Drinking Water

As we prepare to enter 2010, we don’t know whether to take the generic market meds being dispensed by the National Association of Realtors or to reject them and hope we can somehow just stop the voices.

NAR’s is dumping its generic market meds into the drinking water in a giant shift from its fundamental and historic premise that home ownership ought to be based upon the self-reliance of individuals to a new socialist real estate state where wealth is shifted from tax payers to fund the downpayments for otherwise under-qualified first time home buyers.

Schizophrenia is my metaphor for disordered thinking that is not aligned with reality.

On one hand we know we are living in a time of delusion and we desperately want to stop the voices. On the other hand, we continue to pander to the hallucinations because we want a simple solution. We know the voices are not real but we can’t seem to stop them so we drink the water and we pop the pills that will temporarily quiet them but never permanently stop them.

We are becoming more and more desperate because we are on the edge and are finding it more and more difficult to distinguish reality from fiction. The market meds do not help because they create an additional layer of fog that further weakens our discipline and stiffles our resolve to take charge of our individual and collective illness.

Stopping the Voices

There is coming a time when we will have to make a deliberate choice between believing the voices that are telling us all is well and the reality that we are operating our industry from a position of dependency that will eventually render us incapable of recovery.

Like many Americans who are waiting for the government to produce solutions, many in our industry are waiting upon the bureacratic solutions of NAR to stop the voices.