The San Diego Home Blog

An article ran on Sunday in the San Diego Union Tribune which occupied nearly a quarter of one page. It was an apology of sorts, and it was the important kind of piece worthy of a four-column span.

It seems that in the Easter Sunday edition, some 8,000 estimated subscribers received a paper with (get this) the previous week’s comics section! As you might imagine, this didn’t go unnoticed. Angry calls poured in. “Garfield already said that!” Sure, the other “filler” stuff that we have come to enjoy in our daily rag was somewhat contemporary, stuff about some war and a bunch of guys running for president of some country and something about a housing market crisis. I wonder what Garfield thinks about all of that? Sorry, you will have to wait until next week to find out.

Funnies are only funny, I suppose, when they are new and fresh, which brings us to the Big Announcement. It is with a heavy heart that I announce this morning the end of the San Diego Home Blog. It’s time for a change. We are approaching three years here, during which time we managed a to eke out over 660 posts, but we are tired. If we keep going at this rate, if we refuse to evolve and embrace change, we will be no better than the folks who stole Easter. I don’t want to be the one who drives the nice man in Clairemont to the therapist’s couch because he was given the same stats two weeks in a row. One more article on Zillow, and I risk throwing our readers (all six of them) into a state of despair reminiscent of the time they learned The Archies weren’t real people singing in a real band. Or the time Odie ate the cat’s lasagna - same lasgna belonging to the same cat for two consecutive weeks.

I am joining Redfin.

This makes sense because:

• I am breathing.
• I have a real estate license.
• I know how to fill out online forms.
• I am breathing.

And I am kidding, of course, being that it is April Fools Day and all. But the whole FunnyGate incident left me thinking about the idea of change. In a time when I can more than satisfy my Dilbert needs for the next geologic cycle with a simple, two-second online search, there is by all appearances a rowdy throng of agitated newspaper subscribers wanting, dare I say needing, their Sunday morning dose of cartoon hilarity. These people are fewer in number than those like myself who wouldn’t have noticed if the entire Currents Section was suddenly being written in Sanskrit, but they still exist. And these are the people that our current real estate industry still tends to model their business and their efforts around.

This is the one thing that Redfin got right.

It is also the very thing they got wrong. Niche marketing is great, and building an entire business around a single niche, assuming it is large enough to feed the corporate kitty, is also dandy. But, when we start identifying those niches with our stereotypical goggles on, we may find ourselves limiting our actual client base and alienating a larger number of potential customers.

Although I find the Sunday comics an antiquated and flawed humor delivery system, you will notice that I admitted to having read the article about the boo-boo. Call me crazy, but I still read the paper. I have a blog, I know a little html, and I am turning more geek every day, but I still bypass msn.com in favor of the local paper front page for my headlines. I am a hybrid.

If you are a real estate agent over the age of 30 and under the age of retirement, you are an agent in transition, and it is the hybrid that is going to be the cornerstone of your business for the duration. Redfin’s web site, and many others like it, provide an awesome search experience. The Sunday classifieds are going to continue to appeal to a few, but the vast majority of real estate consumers will be getting their news online. How they search and where they search, however, has very little to do with how they buy and sell and with whom. Hybrids.

I encountered two classic examples of this during the past week. The first was a couple who invited us into their home to discuss market conditions and the timing for listing their home. Both were highly educated, both had done more research on real estate current events and economic indicators in the past month than ninety-nine percent of the working agents I know have done in their lifetimes. They had a pile of spreadsheets more impressive than Mel Gibson’s rap sheet. But, now it was time to bring it home. They are hiring an agent. We were referred, and not by Google, but by a real person living in our community.

My second recent hybrid encounter was a buyer. She is a Ph.D who just relocated to San Diego. We have been out looking at homes before. She brought to this meeting a steaming mound of computer printouts with school boundaries and test scores and listings. And she called the meeting as a courtesy. Given the market and her timing flexibility, she is planning on waiting until the end of the year to buy. In the meantime, however, she wants to continue looking at homes every couple of weekends to keep current on the market and the products and the prices. “Are you okay with that?” she wanted to know, saying that she didn’t want to misrepresent or waste my time. Yes, I am always “okay with that,” because that is what we do. We help people buy and sell homes within their timeframes and on their terms. The whole “buying a home thing” is a pretty big deal, after all.

There may come a day when you can entirely automate and depersonalize this business of ours. There may come a day when the vast majority of real estate consumers will be prepared to kick the agent as we know him to the curb. Yet while we are an industry and even a society in transition, I don’t expect to see this day during my career. Our clients for the foreseeable future will be hybrids; they want their Facebooks online and their Doonesbury in print. They want their real estate information on the Internet but they want their closing at the kitchen table.

When you think about it, that’s pretty funny.

For the past several months, we have been reevaluating our business model. Until now, we have been naively been running our business as a “business”. By this, I mean we have endeavored to provide exceptional counsel, service and results to our clients, and for this we have charged a fee for services. Clearly, this traditional business model is no longer saleable in today’s changing marketplace.

When I call a plumber, I am most concerned with his fee. Whether or not he addresses the source of my leaking faucet is of little concern to me. Before I see my doctor, you had better be sure I negotiate a credit at close of incision; what are a couple of sponges left in my chest cavity compared to the hundreds of dollars I will be saving on the bill? And, when buying a new car, I always pay “sticker” as long as they throw in the floor mats.

In real estate, we have all seen “discount” brokers (they prefer to be called “non-traditional” brokers) come and go, and even stay. Most recently, Redfin’s entry into the San Diego real estate market brought the idea of agent “rebates” back to the forefront. We all know how Redfin offers a 1/3 credit to the buyer at close. The beauty of this is that, by all appearances, the agents become order takers rather than advocates, which translates into savings for the consumer. Who cares if you end up paying more for the home? Think of how much you will “save” on fees.

Up, down or flat market (and we have seen them all), there have always been so many hands in my pockets that I have no room for the car keys. Not only am I growing weary of defending my worth and my paycheck, but now I realize that getting paid for my services is despicable, really.

We are now officially a non-profit organization. Sure, we have effectively worked in this capacity in many transactions and have been asked to operate as such in many more, but it is time to make it official. From now on, we will pay you to buy or sell a home through us. We will give you all of our commission plus we will pay your closing costs and your moving company, and we will throw in a couple of hundred bucks at closing to buy yourself something nice. And we will wash your car every Sunday for a year. This may not make good financial sense to us, but, hey - it is competitive out there.

How will we eat? We will take donations, like any good charitable cause. You may donate your used cars and trucks, and if you contribute cash, we will display your name in all of our advertising. There might not be much advertising, unfortunately, because our new program is a start-up. And, of course, we may have to cut back on some of our services (say, the part about marketing your home, protecting your interests prior to and during contract, and negotiating the most favorable terms on your behalf), but that isn’t important. What is important is that you will be “saving” a bundle.

If this concept takes off, we plan on expanding our services. Ultimately, we hope to be able to actually buy the house for you, or in the case of the seller, from you, but that is a long-term goal.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Too many people, as reported by the media and even as in some of the comments on this blog, are on to us. We agents are generally uneducated, loathsome, money-grubbing salesmen with no concern for the welfare of our clients. Instead, we victimize them on a daily basis, hoping they will just buy anything and pay more so that we can make more. For sellers, we just want a fast sale at any price for the same reason; their welfare is of little interest to us. If we serve no useful role in the transaction but instead are just intrusive door-openers, it is time to stop charging the consumer.

Emancipation from Representation! Visit us on line at www.SanDiegoCastles.org, which unfortunately isn’t live yet because we are scaling back.

(Author’s Note: APRIL FOOLS! We are still charging a fee, but you really do get what you pay for).