1000watt blog

“…and in the end, the
love you make is equal to the love you take”
– Lennon/McCartney

As the tectonic shift
in the housing market grinds beneath our nervous feet, this lyric spins in a
loop — the soundtrack to what was, what is and what soon will be in our
industry.

Karma

I don’t wear
Birkenstocks, or snack on brown rice with mushrooms, chard and fresh tofu. There’s
no haze of Nag Champa or cloud of bong smoke wafting in my den. 

But I do believe that
in the end, you simply reap what you sow. It is the law of the land.

Our industry has sown
quite a field these past ten years. Its boundaries envelop banks worldwide and
the fate of hundreds of thousands of consumers who find themselves foreclosed upon
and forsaken by their trusted advisors.  

I don’t mean to gloss
this over or simplify the matter. It’s just the best I can do short of
publishing a book detailing each seed we planted to bring about this blighted
harvest. And I don’t want to do that. I want to find the silver lining – the
thing to which we might look forward during the tough times ahead.

Quiet celebration

What’s happening was
bound to happen, and really, folks, needs to happen. Let’s not fret over those
inside the business who will exit. Truthfully, they need to go. They’re the
coal hiding the gems inside: The best agents. The best brokerages. The best
lenders.

My sympathy is saved
for the thousands of moms and dads, immigrants and working stiffs now facing
the reality that “the dream of homeownership” was oversold.  

Maybe, for those of
us who care about the real estate industry, this can be a time of quiet
celebration. It’s the end of the old, the ordinary, the questionable and the
compromised and the beginning of something new: an industry that lives up to
the trust of its clients.

Let us celebrate:

The end of real
estate as the career of first and last resort.

The end of referring
young clients with aspirations bigger than their savings accounts to guys who
can get them a 0% down, interest-only, 2-year ARM.

The end of writing
loans for people with no jobs. 

The end of advising
sellers to buy a home before they’ve sold their existing home.

The end of getting
away with unleashing an under trained sales force to cut their teeth on the
most important transaction of peoples’ lives.

The professionalism
of the agents and brokers who remain after this reckoning.

The web 2.0 flowering
that will make the transaction better for both the industry and its customers.

The healthy airing of
grievances about the industry’s most egregious lapses.

The love you make

The love is what
comes next. The good stuff that’s already starting to emerge despite the news.
It will come by way of an unspoken apology of change. The love will bring about
an industry that’s transparent. True. Simple. Real. Honest. Social. And
smaller.

I see it coming in
the eyes of a broker friend who tells me he’s mandating service standards that
could drive many from his stable. In the blog posts of agents that speak
candidly to their clients about what’s going on. In the wisdom of the pros that
bear scars from earlier shakeouts that kept them from losing their head in the
run up to this one.

It might take a
quarter, a year, maybe two. Who knows when, really, but it’s coming for sure.  

So I’m perched on the
hill looking out toward the horizon, waiting for the new real estate business about
to unfold.  

---

Sign up for the 1000watt Spotlight e-newsletter
and keep up with the ideas, apps and people that are changing real estate.