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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doughboy who wrote (15107)	11/15/2003 3:01:18 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

The current situation of limited competition is not good for real estate agents or for home buyers and sellers. The high percentage commissions attracts far too many people to work as agents. Most rarely see a commission. In California, in 1989 one of every twelve Californians had a real estate license. It is better now but becoming like 1989 quickly. The agent's mean income in CA is something like $26,000 per year. The mean income for agents working full-time is around $65,000. A select few well known agents essentially "sell their name" to less successful agents and "partner" on listings bring in an income of hundreds of thousands. Of course this indicates that the mean is probably closer to $50k when you exclude the stars. If commissions were say 3% or 4% I'm convinced each working agent would earn the same. They would just handle more sales as there would be fewer agents and less of their time would be spent obtaining listings. Industries with limited competition benefit only owners of the largest firms. The dominant firms are different in each region. In Los Angeles they are: 1.) Cendant/NRT Inc. dba Coldwell-Banker, dba ERA dba Century 21 which owns and operates 692 sales offices, and is the franchisor to another 12,000 offices; 2.) Berkshire Hathaway/Home Services Inc. dba Prudential California Realty dba nine other names, is number two. The total number of offices is not published. Another two firms which dominate in other regions are: 3.) General Motors/GMAC Realty which also owns the mortgage brokerage, Ditech Funding, which advertises those wonderful home loans for 125% of your home equity. Total mortgage portfolio of $72 Billion. Someone's going to be the bag-holder on those. 4.) Long & Foster which owns 160 offices centered around the Washington D.C. area. A more complete listing can be found on this webpage. realsure.com

To: Doughboy who wrote (15107)	11/15/2003 10:04:43 AM
From: Tradelite	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

Doughboy.....this conversation, like many others on the internet, has progressed to its inevitable illogical conclusion. Have already posted my personal reasons for not wanting MY listings to be displayed on the internet under conditions I can't control (and my clients would have agreed with me on that--it's their home, ya know what I mean? And it's my name on those listings, ya know what I mean?) I do think many people on this thread expect far more from real estate brokerage than they are going to get. What they want (whatever that is) can't be provided, and they're looking for someone (the government, maybe?) to change the situation. And I'd really like to know how the people writing on this thread, including you, know anything about "excessive profit" earned by Realtors. Could you cite any figures about the bottom line on any Realtors' tax return, other than speculation? In the end, it's not worth discussing. The people writing here who seem to be the most critical about the real estate service they've received obviously used real estate licensees multiple times for their own ends, and they were free not to do that, weren't they? So what's the beef? If you have any suggestions for making the process of buying and selling homes any easier for all parties involved, this is a good forum to post them. Would be more worthwhile than criticizing the status quo.