One of the first lessons I learned in the Real Estate business was that I needed to focus on listings. “Without listings,” I was told, “you would never be successful in real estate.” That appeared as a very plausible position, so my main focus was always to get listings. But something has happened since fall 2005 and now. Many of you will disagree, but I think with the onset of the limited service broker, the influx of lead generation companies, and the explosion of FSBO across the country, something has changed.
From House Values dot com to Just Listed dot com, and even Zillow dot com, these new players have caused a marked shift in the our industry. Up until the summer of 2006 after which the market started to slow down, these companies were providing leads to help fuel the upward trend. Many FSBO were successful because in my opinion, the market was demand driven. So, when a FSBO decided to list his house, he had a good chance of selling it. Often times the Realtor would end up doing the paperwork for both sides of the transaction.
When the market slowed down, the shift occurred. Now I do not mean to suggest that the above-mentioned factors are exclusively responsible for this, but they are contributing causes. Here are a few observations that I have made: Listing agents are now having to consolidate their efforts to stay afloat; homes are staying on the market quite a bit longer than before; if you are a buyers’ agent with a pipeline, you are not doing so bad. So until the market turns, I don’t know that one can dismiss the notion that there has been a paradigm shift. What’s your opinion?