More perspective

Here's an additional comment on the national property resource and its role in the performance of those agents representing real live people in their effort to make the best possible real estate decisions. That's the key--the best possible decisions. Now, perhaps not every Buyer or Seller desires to make the best possible decision, but why wouldn't they? Real estate decisions can and often do represent the largest disparity in financial consequences of best and something significantly less.

I want to emphasize that I'm not saying the use of the property resource will necessarily undermine the performance of agents who use it. Excellent agents will undoubtedly use it, but they will fold much more into their analysis.

The problem is that the data is still very limited, even if is the best available. The AVM may be the best ever, but it is still focused on AVERAGES to perform in a superior way defining the risk associated with wall street and banking, ie bundles of mortgages. That's what the AVM system was built for ---remember to FOLLOW the money.

The Buyer and Seller are NOT concerned with averages--they'd like to BEAT the averages and they need the help of excellent agents to do that. The information and the analysis to beat the averages is NOT in the national property resource. Oh, it may be a good rough cut, but not much better than existing MLS systems.
PLUS the AVM is inherently flawed if the goal is beating the odds and pulling the rabbit outa the hat for your
client. We're back to fiduciary duty again. The national property resource creates a new AVERAGE standard and agents who are satisfied with becoming technicians and having their performance levels set by programmers who were designing an application for wall street and banks risk the disintermediation that is increasingly dismissed as impossible for real estate. It is not impossible and I believe the national property resource and AVM is a big step in that direction.

There are still outstanding travel agents out there, but most people have become satisfied with online tickets and less than stellar service. The standards changed and less is now OK.

Same thing could happen with real estate agent sales. One size fits all and that one size is pretty darn average. An even bigger problem is the one size doesn't really have much to do with finding the RIGHT HOUSE or RIGHT BUYER. The irony is that the trade organizations are behind the changes to real estate sales because the changes put them in a stronger position--control, captive consumers of their products/services and POWER, lots of POWER. The public is being manipulated by the false promise of voluminous data and techie agents when they actually need more of the wisdom that characterized the business 25 years ago. Gee, 25 years ago trade organizations weren't powerful, profitable or influential!