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

To: Think4Yourself who wrote (77938)	5/21/2007 4:55:32 PM
From: Tradelite	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

If each one of us had $100 for each year that your prediction about the demise of Realtors and the MLS has been made by people all over the country, we could retire in grand style. One of the problems with that prediction is that it has no basis in economics. Here's just one of the arguments we often hear about "highly paid" Realtors that has grown pretty stale: "Because the price of houses has gone up, comissions have soared to unfairly high levels." Yeah, right. Ten years ago, being in the real estate business cost a mere fraction of what it costs today. No one had to invest in offices full of personal computers (and full-time IT staffs), cell phones, blackberries, expensive electronic lockboxes, personal and company websites, or even a decent continuing education in real estate. These days, a "salesperson" licensee needs to keep getting additional training and accumulate more professional designations to keep up with the competition. Autos and gasoline haven't gotten cheaper. Good agents have so many customers and clients that many of them have to hire entire fleets of assistants to help with paperwork and legwork. Critics of the real estate industry seem to think the consumer can do it all himself these days, simply because he can see houses on the internet. Well......someone has to put those house listings on the internet, pay for the infrastructure to keep them there, pay for the paper and ink to write contracts, let people into the houses to inspect them, and pay for all the other services that clients are going to need if they're serious about buying or selling. The cost of these services isn't going down, even if real estate prices drop by a mile. If brokers aren't getting paid enough to sustain their businesses, they won't discount their pay down to negative territory....... they will simply go out of business, and many do.