The following is a collection of reader comments found on Inman.com:
Banks should step up efforts with pre-foreclosure, auction sales
The ‘unbelievable’ business of real estate
"I agree with you 100 percent that these times call for being positive and truthful. Alan Greenspan told the Wall Street Journal Report last week that we are witnessing a 100-year event. That could possibly mean that in his opinion our housing crisis surpasses that of the great depression of the 1930s.
"The truth is, this problem will not be fixed from the top down. It will only be fixed from the bottom up. Courageous positive individuals need to take action now to clear excessive inventory (one house at a time) before pricing will normalize. The banks are failing to sell the pre-foreclosure homes. The banks are failing to auction the foreclosed homes.
"Because they failed to be realistic twice, the banks are flooding the market with REOs at depressed prices, sometimes lower than the short-sale offers they received. I’m positive that banking reform, or at least intelligent banking management, is necessary to allow us individuals to assist in liquidating problem properties from excessive inventories."
—Tom Teece
Bring on the national data standards
National MLS a ‘waste of time’
"A national MLS is not needed, but a gateway system with some national data standards would be a great help.
"Local MLSs always have borders, so the need to display or share data from a neighboring MLS is necessary. We need a cost-effective way of accomplishing that goal while allowing local expertise to influence the local system.
"We need national data standards to allow all brokers to compete with third-party aggregates. They publish a standard and we all deliver data to them in their format. They deliver consistent results with great data translation because the sending party did the translation.
"National franchises, large brokers and small brokers would all benefit from a standard Internet data display format since the cost of delivering solutions would be driven down due to the lack of having to deal with 700 different data formats and rules."
—Joseph Ballarino
Brand is not about dogs and jackets
Real estate commissions are negotiable — if you ask
"I’m not convinced that a ‘brand’ is a balloon or gold jacket or even a dog wearing a gold jacket, as has been suggested. Those things are brand icons. A brand can be defined as the emotional relationship between a customer and a company. The icons are just visual cues to help customers reconnect with those feelings.
"The brand itself is defined by the interactions that a customer has with a company. It’s tricky in real estate because the customer’s point of contact is usually with an independent contractor and it takes clear vision along with subtle but consistent management on the part of the broker to drive home the importance of delivering on the promise of a brand.
"The reason so much of real estate has become commoditized is that with no real barriers to entry anyone can become an agent — whether they are capable of or willing to deliver that high-level ‘brand experience’ to their clients or not.
"Unfortunately, too many agents tend to do far too little on behalf of their clients. But at some point the clients have figured all of this out. And that’s where new commission structures and pricing systems gain their first foothold.
"And, as has also been suggested, somewhere within all of this chaos and confusion is where opportunity awaits."
—John Strum
‘Old-shoe real estate is dying’
Death of the listing presentation
"It seems that everything that is old-shoe real estate is dying. With technological advances in regards to data-collection, marketing, imaging, MLS, etc.
"The technology is available to everybody. It’s the way that the technology is used that will separate a pro from a novice.
"Sellers will no doubt want to list the property with someone who they like, trust and have confidence in. The data presentation may have nothing to do with the outcome."
—Mott Marvin Kornicki
‘Wake up and smell the Internet’
Los Angeles Times axes real estate section
"Not much of a surprise, here. The surprise is that although the Times now knows that real estate in newspapers is dead, so many brokers don’t.
"The paradigm has changed: real estate is shopped online now. Maybe someday soon the brokers who justify spending six figures in newspaper ads each month will wake up and smell the Internet!"
—Mike Parker
Information compiled by Daniel Rothamel, Inman News Community manager.
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