Like most of you agents out there I wonder once in a while if the grass is greener on the other side. In one case the other side was a friend from church, an agent working for an established national company. In the second instance I had to satisfy my curiosity about the new kid in town, a Nevada technology-driven company that gave a presentation in a real conference room using the term "virtual" about most everything else.
Neither encounter proved entirely satisfying.
Old-school agents usually downplay the changes brought on by the Internet. Some are in complete denial that anything is changing. Some can afford to be blasé because they've been blessed with the quiet success of the good old days. They tell stories about an agent who was dropped off in the middle of a cornfield, who made his way to the nearest public phone booth where he started calling people starting on the last page of the local phone directory. The Zswlienskys had never been called by a real estate agent and picked him up with their John Deer and invited him in for lunch. They sold their trailer and moved into a bungalow. The Zimmermans were next. The rest is history. They named the town after him. You can look it up on the Internet.
Speaking of the Internet, that's where the still youngish man lives who gave the presentation about the new way of doing real estate, including a pretty spiffy virtual transaction process. There was one thing he said that gave away his provenance which is programming. "It's crazy to show a buyer 20 homes." Well, he's never met the Zswliensky's grand daughter who is planning to move to Seattle to join that Redmond behemoth. She thinks herself any bit as Internet savvy as any agent and, if it weren't for that keypad and lock-box she would not need an agent at all. So, since she is doing all the work anyway and finding the homes on the Internet, the least she can expect is to see as many homes as she damn well pleases.
The contrast of these two encounters with the old and the new got me thinking. I am sort of in between the two camps. The old-school agents, besides their good stories, have much wisdom to dispense and I seek them out for their experience and down-to-earth plain smarts. There isn't much the Internet-raised agent can tell me that's going to make me a better real estate agent. But the Internet-raised agent does understand that this business is changing even if he or she doesn't know exactly what this means.
So both sides have a lot to learn - from each other.
© 2007, Gerhard N. Ade
Comments(7)