For A Few Dollars More

The sequel to a Fist Full Of Dollars has been released. Joel over at the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog, (my favorite real estate blog) has a post about Zillow's new infusion of Vulture*Venture Capital. A comment on the post got me to thinking about the past again. It's going to be interesting to see how NAR, Cendant and other majors decide if they are going to spin this. I know at a broker level there have been some rumblings and some paranoia or as it was described in the comment on Joel's blog, "Zillonoia". In days past there were quite a few instances of the "The Sky Is Falling" messages being used to warn the troops that the data pirates were coming. Does anyone remember "The Lion Over The Hill" thread that started in 1995 and carried it's way through to the dot bomb timeline? Do a search in Realty Times and you'll find some old articles that reference it. It was hard to keep track of who was the biggest perceived threat back then, It moved around from "Two Kids in a Garage" to Bill Gates and everything in between so often that the average agent or broker had no idea how many people not to trust. I had to stop in the middle of searching for old articles on the subject because the wayback machine was starting to upset my stomach. Looks like history may be doomed to repeat itself with this and the real or perceived attacks on commissions. I'm holding out hope that enough people in the business have learned from it to keep their eye on the ball and not expend too much energy on spoon fed doses of paranoid rhetoric. Mistakes of the past are some of the best tools to use in creating a new business model. What's most intriguing to me this time around is the quality of the resources at hand by even the smallest player on the field. If I were an agent or broker I would have a fearless attitude about it. I wouldn't ignore it, but I wouldn't burn up a bunch of good karma on the sequel.

*I better be careful, I may need some of this some day:)