According to the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), a long-awaited 60 Minutes segment on real estate will air on CBS this Sunday at 7 PM. After dealing with the 60 Minutes investigative reporters for more than a year, here is what NAR expects:
- The segment by Leslie Stahl will focus on the impact of the internet on the brokerage business and the emergence of "Internet" business models and contrast them with "traditional" full-service models.
- The show will include a lengthy interview with Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, the Seattle-based company that claims to be "the industry's first online brokerage for residential real estate."
- The piece will include interviews with sales agents for full-service brokerages in the Seattle area. It may also include some footage from the NAR annual meeting in New Orleans, where a 60 Minutes crew was on site for three days.
- The segment may mention NAR's anti-trust lawsuit over their Internet listing display policy but it will not delve into the topic in any depth. NAR staff spent many hours educating the CBS producers about the topic and they decided not to get into the issue.
- Nor will the segment likely discuss at length minimum service rules or other issues raised by critics like the Consumer Federation of America such as the make-up of real estate commissions. Once they delved into the charges and counter charges surrounding competition in real estate, the producers found that the whole topic was much more complex and not nearly as clear-cut as it appeared.
- The entire segment was almost killed this spring. However, CBS apparently decided that it had so much invested in the story that it went ahead with a highly abridged version.
The bottom line is that NAR says it does not expect that the segment will make REALTORS® happy but it could have been much, much worse. NAR notes: "Be glad that it's Mother's Day and the show will probably draw fewer than its average 14 million viewers."
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