(We told AR Bob we would do a satire on the MarketWatch article last week. We posted a bullet-point piece about it with the goal of sparking quick debate. All of your great comments to it were just that. Finally, this is our send up on what we thought about the article. We link to it again somewhere below.)

(LAKE TAHOE REAL ESTATE BLOG) Well, a business writer has written another article. Lets call it THE ARTICLE, and it calls for desperate measures for desperate times. It says we are in these.

The price of oil. The credit crunch. The stock market swoon. Healthcare. The housing market. And Business Writing? The downturn in the US economy is across the board, not in any one particular industry alone.

Never mind that The Article only talks about the housing industry, while suggesting calamity to solve it, we’re all bozos on the same bus, and our national economy is certainly more than the housing market.

We need to cut back as a country in any way possible. We’ve got to hunker down, dust off our individualism, get back to our pioneer roots, live off the land, raise chickens, and get rid of every middle man we can.

Out With Gas Stations :
The first thing we need to do is stop buying gas from gas stations. Who needs AM/PM workers anyway? And it doesn’t take a professional to produce it. (But it does take usurous-thinking to sell it.) We’ll make our own gas, even if it does take a bit of figuring out. A backyard still will do. And we can just ride horses again until we get it right. (I would have said “asses”, but I didn’t want to offend the writer of The Article.)

Down With Banks :
And lets take all of our money out of the bank. Never mind the Great Depression; lets run on them. Bankers don’t know how to take care of it anyway, otherwise there would be no credit crunch, and there’s just no skill at all involved in locking money up in a vault. We can all go back to burying our money in the backyard again, near our gas still, and who knows, we might strike oil and solve some of these problems when we do.

Go Away Stock Brokers :
This means no more stock brokers for us too. They surely are expendable. There is nothing to what they do, and egad their commissions are egregious, and overly expensive if not redundant too. Sayonara, good riddance and good-bye to these miserable miserly money managers, we can buy stocks directly from the companies issuing them, and hope we don’t get skinned when we do.

Healthcare, Scram :
Those Doctors and Nurses, they’re outta here. Especially those Doctors, they make as much money as  overpaid stock brokers. And abracadabra Hospitals are gone too. There’s nothing to it, anybody can do what they do with a band-aid and some aspirin. There, that solves the whole healthcare crisis in three short sentences. We didn’t have a healthcare industry when we expanded westward anyway (a long life expectancy just isn’t what it’s cracked up to be).

Listing Agents too :
Now about the housing industry. Listing Agents, those overpaid, selfish, scoffllawed salesman kind, superfluous scoundrels that they are. There’s no value in what they do. We’ll cut them out too, all of them 86’ed immediately, and besides that, owners can sell their houses just as easily anyway. Never mind the field-day it will create for the lawyers who will have to get unwary owners out of the messes they create, it’s just the price of doing business in troubled times. And lawyers need to make more money too.

And Out-of-Industry Know-it-Alls :
Now on to business writers. They’re middle men too, spin savants and opinion shapers between you, raw data, statistics and the inside of their head bone. Sometimes fact, and other times fiction is what they produce, and who really needs it? There is no skill involved, anybody can write, and there’s just no sense in paying big money to someone to misinterpret facts and information, even if its only every now and then.

We just don’t need writers poking their noses into any of our businesses who have decided, for reasons known only to them, that they know a business better than those that are in it. (It’s just tacky.) So, lets have all business writing done by the AM/PM workers we got rid of in the gas industry, by the bankers we dumped out of the banking industry, by itinerant stock brokers, out-of-work doctors and nurses, and oh yes the vagrant listing agents too.

And you know what, that would probably be a good idea. It is a great place to start. Lets look at out-of-work listing agents first, because don’t you know it would be novel, and perhaps fun, to have someone who actually knows about an industry to write business articles about it.

So why are we picking on business writers. Well, it couldn’t possibly be that one of them wrote The Article in question. Here it is in its entirety, and the highlights of what it proposes are as follows:

•     Sellers need to sell their homes themselves, and list it on the MLS for a few hundred dollars.

•     *Sellers should offer the full 5% or 6% commission to the Buyers agent.

•     *Sellers should suggest that the Buyers agent cut their commission to the Buyer.

•     The Strategy is certain to attract the attention of Buyers agents because they would make more money.

•     Buyers shopping on the internet could contact the Seller directly, and bypass agents altogether, and save even more money.

Read an excellent, national discussion on these points here.

Obviously The Article only addresses the housing industry in general, and listing agents in particular. Apparently, so the writer has deducted anyway, the buck starts and stops with the real estate professional. We’ll have a nationwide, overnight turnaround in the housing industry if we can just get rid of those pesky, overbearing listing agents.

Perhaps the deduction mechanism in the writer’s thinking gland is askew, otherwise how could he disregard, not know, or forget that a top notch listing agent will get more for a house than an owner can almost every time? The writers faulty fact filter just bypassed this one. It just might not have been important to him, or he found some other facts that he liked better. (One can do that with statistics, pick one you like, toss out others, build a case, and be long gone when the dust settles.)

The truth is the writer uses some NAR (National Association of REALTORS) stats in support of The Article, and disregards others from the same source that contradicts it. “16% more” is one of those. Now how about that?

So how much more will a real estate professional get for a home? NAR says 16%, that’s the number above, or about $30,000 on average. But the truth is we don’t know. There is much debate about the veracity of that number. Sometimes we can get a whole lot more, and sometimes it’s a little bit more, and it can be nearly the same. It depends on the house. There is an excellent national discussion, both pro and con on this here.

Regardless of how much more it is, we also do know this. We will always save a seller time, reduce stress, significantly decrease the risk of liability and litigation, and usually make more money... every time.

What we can not do, in all seriousness, is solve the rest of our country’s economic woes. A bit out  of our league, we wouldn’t even propose to, though we wish we could.

If one is to write about our industry, and then suggest a basic shift in how it goes its business practices, it makes sense that they at least know what we know.

We, however, can not inject, infuse, ingest, graft, glue, pin, tack, stick, tape or osmotically transfer professional real estate knowledge, practice and licensing credentials onto someone, like a scribe, or anyone else, without our training and experience. They are just not us.

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