Brief story re valuation

I ran 8 mile Team in Training route yesterday- getting lost and doing another half mile and missing a water stop. Felt pretty good after a week of reverting to old training program, but was a LITTLE tired. At 63 the hard runs take some zip out. Had to show property later in day, but got a call from a broker friend that a new listing was coming up for me to photograph and did I want to go check it out? We drove up, poked around, looked at the views, condition, neighborhood. etc etc. Then came the QUESTION--what's it worth? I thought a few seconds (I knew the QUESTION was coming) and named a narrow range of values. In response I learned, the property had already been listed--right in the middle of my range. The broker seemed relieved--not a very easy place to price and the market isn't on fire. I went back today and took photos--had to wait much of the day to get some nice ocean colors, but they came out well, capturing the feel and showing the strong aspects. Someone looking at the photos and then seeing the house will experience familiarity and reinforcement--that's what photos can do to lay the foundation of resonance.

Ok, you're probably wondering what the point is. This scene above could have happened 25 years ago--literally--we knew each other back then. So what's all those years and a heap of technology really done to improve things? The national property resource would have us believe that a few keystrokes at a computer are all that's needed to arrive at an AVM figure--that IS the value of the house--forget that the operator has never been to the house or the town. There are still brokers who do it the old way--looking at the house, the vicinity, the potential appeal, the negatives. As well as a host of other nuances that come into play without conscious effort. Yeah, it's sorta an art. Technology doesn't like art and because real estate loves technology, it follows that the future path of real estate is headed away from art and toward a new world where competent technicians replace artists.

What about the Buyers and Sellers? They are also impressed by technology. They want more information, faster, available though more hardware and increasingly diverse formats. They want more and real estate will give it to them, because corporations make millions delivering it, training how to use it and inferring that if it's not used, something dire will occur--like net profits of the tech companies might not meet next quarter's targets. Trade organizations enthusiastically participate in this frenzy to satisfy a need that shouldn't even be a want.

Real people live in real houses, not in a computer. Wisdom about the real world tends to arise from interacting with the real world, not with processing biased subsets of information that may have little relevance in determining resonance between Buyer and home.

What will happen when the artists are gone? People will still buy houses--that's one of the challenges that continues to distort the quality of service delivered by the real estate community. People would buy houses without the real estate community. The trade organizations strive to control the whole process, but the process  would flow forward without the organizations or its members. In other countries, the process is very different than here. It works--people buy houses. In some places they pay much less than they do in the US. We need to support the technology, the organizations and the training--lots of overhead there. How much of that expense supports art? That's a tough one!