Joel Burslem brought up this point a couple of weeks ago. In his post, he mentioned two services, Incredibleagents.com and Homethinking.com.

Oddly, Incredibleagents offered only three agents reviews for the entire State of Oregon. I don’t know if that’s an indictment of Oregon agents’ lack of technology experience, or because agents are too busy buying and selling in a “relatively” stable real estate market.

Homethinking offered no agent reviews, but an impressive list of agents. They show current sales statistics for each agent, but oddly enough, the agents themselves don’t care. Well, most don’t. Two agents are listed as sponsors in Eugene. At the time of this post, no buyer or seller had reviewed these agents. In fact, out of 1013 agents listed for Eugene, zero have reviews. Not very helpful to buyers..yet…

Joel raises the question - why aren’t there more services like this? I don’t know either, but I have my suspicions. Agents either get the internet or they don’t. If they don’t, they probably fear the very technology that can help them maintain an edge in an increasingly challenging real estate market. So sites that cater to tech savvy agents (other than social networks) are few and far between. I believe that many agents don’t want to contribute to (or legitimize) sites like homethinking because those sites take away agents’ innate advantage with clients - controlling and managing information. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this assumption, except that it’s completely wrong. The market already opened that box. There’s no going back.

Technology is not what is hurting agents the most. What’s hurting them is the sheer number of agents battling it out as low-cost seller alternatives slowly erode the pool of available homes. 1013 agents in Eugene (according to homethinking.com), in a city that turns over, at best, about 800-900 homes per quarter. That’s > 1 home per agent, per quarter. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that supply far outstrips demand, and as with most markets, it will seek equilibrium one way or another.

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