While many Realtors spent the past several years finding other ways to make money, a few of us have taken the challenge of our market head on. The differences between those that stuck around vary from the “Ultra Successful in the Early 2000’s” to the “Don’t Know Any Betters”, but we stuck around. It has been an honorable battle and the experience earned as a full-time Real Estate pro over the past three years is priceless. But one thing that I am not seeing yet and maybe the world has changed just this much is the agent with a true market share or controlling a certain market. Five or ten years back you would see a single, usually veterans, Realtor signs up and down a road or several of them throughout a neighborhood and what they were able to do is “own” a particular market. We all know the ones I am talking about that seemed to dominate the Geist waterfront homes or the high end Carmel estates. But it just hasn’t seemed to come back to that. Now these are not stupid business people, they are very successful and the real leaders of an industry and they are not listing one house after another. So where are they? What has happened to that business? I am going to take my wildest guess and hope it at least gets us thinking about how we have evolved.
I think the general population, buyers and sellers, have outwitted us and figured out the truth about our industry. Most listing agents and buyers agents all do the exact same thing. No one agent has the stream of ready buyers in their back seat waiting to be shown the secret listing that agent is holding back. Buyers see the same listings as agents and know that the pickings are slim right now. Realtors, just like every other service provider have lost the power of information and that may just be a good thing. With any listing agent being able to reach the same buyers market as any other agent, using the local Realtor may not have its advantages. So did that agent quit and maybe retire into the sunset? Has that successful agent evolved into a different business model? I don’t know, but I do know that it just doesn’t seem to be the same. Or maybe they know this real estate game so well that they are just sitting back ready to pounce at just the right time, in which they will regain that dominate market share. They are watching the rest of us scrambling for deals and as that exact trigger point pops, they will react and we won’t even know what hit us. Either way, I know that Realtor with a dominate market share must have its place and sooner or later it will be back, but I can’t imagine things won’t always be a little different.
-curt
