Sellsius real estate marketing blog

Guest post by Jonathan Dalton~

Over the past several months I’ve found myself inexorably withdrawing from the real estate blogging world. It’s not that I have issue with what’s being written or the issues being debated. Rather, it’s a growing sense that it’s all been said. And after a while, purely academic debates lose their luster.

Take the recent series on Agent Genius by Danilo Bogdanovic, “The Future of the Real Estate Industry.” Danilo’s basic premise, stated in the very first paragraph, is “it’s obvious that the real estate industry is changing?”

In this case, obvious is in the eye of the beholder. Put another way, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

One day in the near future I’ll write about Charles Schwab and the impact it had on the way stock commissions were viewed … and the reality that thirty years after the so-called revolution, full-commission brokerages remain in business. Dented and bruised, perhaps, but not because of the “necessity” of change.

But to do so would be to destroy my own basic premise that it’s all been said. Divorced commissions, standards of entry, commission rates (as much as can be discussed without raising the ire of the Department of Justice), the much-heralded and largely meaningless DOJ vs. NAR suit (one of the most widely misunderstood cases in recent history), hyper-local blogging, blogs vs. static sites, the worth of social media …

We in the real estate blogging world have been discussing these issues for the past few years. (My own blog, AllPhoenixRealEstate.com, will celebrate its second anniversary just past the first of the year; a Realtown blog preceded it by six months.) And what is becoming increasingly apparent is we’re talking largely to ourselves.

The general public has little interest in these back-stage conversations. Transparency isn’t useful when people aren’t engaged by what they see.

For that matter, the larger population of real estate agents has little interest in what we’re discussing on the blogs. And maybe that’s as it should be. The vast majority of agents have no interest in our internecine debates about the necessity of changing commission structures because their own commission structure isn’t under pressure.

They realize what the rest of us often forget – there are no absolutes. There are no “have to’s.” There simply are choices to be made based on our perception and interpretation of current conditions. Authoring a blog doesn’t convey any extra authority, much as many of us tend to believe. It just means we have a vehicle for our opinions.

At this stage, I’ve read them all. Wake me up when there’s something new.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate blogs, real estate industry, NAR, DOJ, Jonathan Dalton

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