where are we now?

Wasn't able to suppress a faint urge to straighten my office area (my office is legendary) and ran across some of the promo materials I picked up in Sacramento from the NEW statewide MLS in support of their merger scenario and the additional $750,000 of credit line. The pink sheet is dated June 4th--almost 2 months ago. Still no merger agreement. No recent news. No hybrid NEW Statewide application. There have been tentative appointments to the new combined board, but they've not been made public. Sounds like more of the same? Still wondering who is actually in charge and why they aren't making better decisions. Tried to run a demo of the outsourced NEW Statewide MLS CMA program that pulled up on Google Alert and the video wouldn't start. Oh well.

Is there a sincere effort underway to create the best MLS application possible OR is the NEW Statewide MLS just a shaky preemptive launch to discourage other entities who might aspire to consolidate data for the entire state? If you're the 800 lb gorilla maybe you don't need to be a cutting edge food forager to keep smaller creatures from messing around with the resources in your jungle? The "if we don't do it, someone else will" mentality is OK, but with a BIG IF. That IF involves the end users getting a product that's state of the art and equal to or better than any other entity would likely produce---at a competitive price, with competitive support and training. If that doesn't happen, the end users suffer the consequences of an ill conceived corporate positioning strategy. Stuff like that happens in the real corporate business world.

What does all this mean for the public? Are they getting better service from their agents than they did 10 or 20 or 30 years ago? Do Buyers choose the RIGHT HOUSE and Sellers find the RIGHT BUYER with greater frequency than they did in the past decades? That question is not asked. Being preemptive to stay preeminent takes a lot of time and energy! Besides, the public WILL buy and sell houses, regardless of the answer.

Working on a longer blog re fascination in real estate--as you might expect, that topic is a challenge!