360Digest

There’s lots of buzz about Steven D. Levitt and Stephan Dubner’s article in the NYTimes entitled “Endangered Species”: Why Real Estate Agents Are on the Way Out”.

Their premise is that there are too many real estate agents, they charge too much for their services and, thanks to various market pressures and especially some recent online innovations, the real-estate agent will soon join a list of endangered service-worker species.

Jonathan J. Miller in Matrix points out that this is an overly simplistic comparison simply due to the importance of the dollar amount of the transaction.

Inman Blog notes “While comparing real estate agents with travel agents is convenient for argument sake, buying a home is quite different from organizing a family trip to Maui” and invites readers to comment on the article.

I take particular issue with the hostility shown by Levitt and Dubner. Either they had a bad experience, they’ve found something “meaty” to grab on to further their book sales, or they truly resent the career choices and salaries made by real estate agents.

I can point to a few phrases the two use to convey their contempt, but the article taken as a whole, has more power than the few examples I can give. However, the first sentence starts out by setting the tone for the entire article: “It is hard to think of an occupation that garners less goodwill these days than the real-estate agent. More often than not, agents are portrayed as hustlers or sharks, unimaginative opportunists who, for not all that much effort, pocket a significant chunk of the sale price of your home.”

Funny, I never felt any lack of goodwill from anyone… until I read this!

Their piece in the New York Times is just one in a series of increasingly hostile and bitter articles from commentators and writers criticizing real estate agents. Reading Damon Darlin’s blog entries and the comments he incites on The Walk-Through makes me wonder what prompts such hostility.

I’ve noticed that most of the authors of these hostile comments are men. And most real estate agents are women. Most, if not all, of the new players in the high-tech real estate world are men. Men from Ivy League schools with advanced degrees.

Zillow? The management listed are all men.

Redfin? Men.

Trulia? Men.

HomePriceMaps? Men.

Home Gain? Mostly men.

HouseValues? 16 out of 18 managers are men.

Of course, most of the real estate companies here in Seattle are run by men, Windermere, J.L. Scott, my own company, Coldwell Banker Bain, and I assume it’s the same elsewhere in the U.S..

But the field workers, the minions, the agents, they’re mostly women.

Statistically, real estate sales is a feminine occupation. The majority of real estate agents are women. The average age is 52 years old. Most do not have a college degree.

Stockbrokers, who are sales people who do essentially the same kind of work as Real Estate brokers, and have the basically same educational and licensing requirements, are mostly men. But no one’s going after them in this hostile way.

You don’t see this spate of hostile articles pointed in their direction, the flurry of activity to get a piece of this particular pie.

Nearly two trillion dollars are exchanged each year in new and existing home sales and these transactions provide millions of Americans with jobs and result in hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity. In total, the housing sector accounts for about 22 percent of the annual gross domestic product. Housing represents the major source of wealth for U.S. household and more than 7 in 10 American families own their own homes.

And most of these sales are made by women.

The underlying message in much of this is that these women don’t deserve to make the amount of money that they are. Never mind that, according to NAR statistics, most agents work 46 hours a week and make around $40K a year. Apparently that’s just too much money for a technologically unsophisticated, under-educated, over-worked, middle-aged lady the same age as their Mom, to make.

With their superior education and brainpower, these new real estate companies will single-handedly reshape the real estate field and tell us how much our time and energy is worth.

Thank goodness we lady agents can all quit worrying our pretty little heads about this! Free enterprise be damned. We’ll just have to be content to make what they think we’re worth.

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