Thinking about the general mindset CREA takes towards Realtor.ca I am reminded about the story of the old couple who bought a new couch and placed their old one at the end of their driveway with a sign pinned to it that read, “Free couch”. At the end of the day as the sun was setting, the couch remained at the end of the driveway so the old couple laboured to drag it back into the garage.
The next day they repeated the process but this time with a larger sign that read, “FREE COUCH” in letters large enough to see from half a block away. At the end of the second day they dragged the couch back into the garage. On the third day they placed big red throw cushions on the couch and continued to drag it out to the curb each morning, then back into the garage at the end of the day until a week had passed with no one showing the slightest interest.
“I don’t understand,” the wife said as they struggled to get it to the end of the driveway for the seventh time. “It is a fine couch at a few hundred dollars, let alone for free.” With that the husband pulled the sign off, turned it over and wrote in big bold letters, “Couch for sale, $300.” They went inside to have their morning tea. About 20 minutes later, as the wife was rinsing their cups in the sink, she glanced out the window to see the couch was gone.
Value is as much perception as it is a reality. When I began my real estate career more than a decade ago, new listings were coveted brass tacks contained within the sacred pages of glossy covered listings catalogues. People would come from miles around to try to woo us into parting with a copy for their own personal use. Their eyes would light up when you placed the latest catalogue into their hands and a genuine bond was cemented as you did. This left us to set the tone and the terms this bond established between Realtor and home buyer, Realtor and home seller.
Somewhere along the way, being at the technological forefront became more important to our industry than preserving the value of the information we generate and disseminate, or than the relationships we established with the public. The future of all business lies in our ability to replicate all the values of personal service, knowledge and intuition through an electronic computer monitor, tablet or smartphone, or so the technology industry would have us believe.
I am not an old-school Realtor who never embraced technology as you could easily assume from my points here. Very much the opposite in fact.
As the current CREA Futures panel contemplates the path our industry has taken us and where we want it to lead us going forward, I hope they will give some serious consideration to where the true value of our business is and has always resided, and understand that it is not enough for us as Realtors to know that the value of the information we create is invaluable to the public. More importantly, the perception of its value depends entirely on how we choose to deliver it. That there is room to improve on this is an understatement.
This panel will be enticed to believe the many technologies tempting us from just over the horizon hold the answers we seek, but know that it is technology that has placed our industry in the precarious position it finds itself in today. Technology has oversaturated our industry by allowing brokerages to hire new agents far beyond the limits of the bricks and mortar spaces once needed to accommodate such growth. Technology has allowed us to complete many of the tasks of our business with a mouse click rather than a handshake. Technology has created the sense of entitlement the public, and to an extent, government, feels they have over our work.
If we do not place the human element back at the centre as the most important factor of all the discussion this panel enters into, take the time to look back to what has worked best for our industry and be less distracted by what new technology enhancement lies just ahead, we will decreasingly be at the centre of the business of real estate in the mind of the public.
Apps are little more than throw cushions and if we continue to place them at the end of the curb simply out of fear of what might happen if we don’t, it is the technology, not the real estate industry that in the end will prevail.
Mike Montague
Sales rep
Sutton Group Incentive Realty
Barrie, Ont.
