Technology in RE
NAR Explains DOJ Settlement
July 8, 2008 by REALonomics · Leave a Comment
A few weeks ago, both NAR and the DOJ announced a settlement of the suit broought by DOJ against NAR reagrding its VOW policies and competitive restricition created by the policy.
Here is the official scripted response by NAR from Vicki Cox Golder, 2008 NAR First Vice President & Laurie Janik, NAR General Counsel. NAR President Dick Gaylord is also featured here.
Our Genie is on the Loose & Fresh out of Wishes
July 8, 2008 by REALonomics · Leave a Comment
REALonomics understands the real estate industry, both its abstract side and its empirical dimensions.
We have been inside, outside and throughout the industry for quite some time. Our vantage point has changed, enabling us to see what we heretofore could not. In the world of business development and economic analysis one’s vantage point can bring the kind of insight that frankly, changes one’s faulty fundamental assumptions while confirming sound precept.
REALonomics now realizes, without further equivocation, analysis or debate, that our industry’s real estate genie has been released from its bottle and is fresh out of wishes!
Pushing the Vapor Back into the Leaky Bottle
From here on out, all attempts to capture the vapor, return it to its confines and cork the RE bottle will fail.
The Genie that once belonged to us, obeyed us, served us and made us what we once were is loose and fresh out of wishes.
The bottle is tarnished. Rubbing the bottle produces nothing. Our Genie is loose and now serving multiple masters simultaneously, none of whom, save one, the consumer, has sway over the Genie’s capacity to grant new wishes.
It’s impossible to bottle this kind of vapor; its seepage passes through the tiniest of spaces, spilling into the open atmosphere, moving where it wills to go. Where does the Genie go? It ALWAYS takes the path of least resistance, shunning confines, rejecting control and moving to open expanse where it finds its ultimate economic freedom.
Bottling the vapor no longer creates reliable “RE Economic Tonic” for the industry. The vapor is meant to be breathed, not bottled.
RGB, NGB and NGCs
Retail Generation Brokerage (RGB) used the bottle to control the Genie in vertical markets where the consumer was required to submit to the model in order to invest in real estate. Net Generation Brokerage (NGB) is the post 2000 freedom model where horizontal peer collaboration is replacing hierarchal control models.
The real estate industry is now the most vulnerable mainline industry to peer-to-peer models where the consumer and the Genie meet up for property inventory data exchanges and local community collaboration. The context is different and the conversation is different. Both the Genie (property and community information) and the consumer have reached agreement…FREEDOM Rules, open space ROCKS!
Vertical (retail, local style bricks and mortar) real estate brokerage models are being quickly replaced with a viral model, spread by a Genie on the loose and fresh out of wishes.
Two dangers to the industry and its economic models occur in this environment. First, there is the danger of complacency, of not re-tooling our economic ship so that it can operate fluidly in a viral, horizontal world where profitability is defined by open, collaborative peer models facilitated by the real estate industry.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there are now signs of the emergence of what REALonomics calls “self brokering” whereby and wherein the consumer creates their own economic reality, ignores real estate professionals, only calling on them if they must and when they so desire for services they define for themselves.
The next generation of “consumer-buyers-sellers-clients” that will fuel the recovery and beyond will be Next Generation Consumer (NGCs) whose informational points of reference are alltogether dissimilar to old line retail brokerages.
Great News and More Great News!
Great news! The Genie, once our beckoned servant, existing only to accomplishing our economic wishes, rather than rejecting us, invites us to follow into new the new economic space of opportunity…to collaborate, to join the viral horizontal world of the consumer with new approaches to property information management and peer-to-peer community information services.
More great news! Never before has the industry and its adherents been afforded the opportunity to engage in a kind of real estate information alchemy, where our old lead bottle can be turned to a golden horizontal field of freedom for both us and our partner, the consumer.
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