Missing The Point

There are some things that adapt well to the power of the Internet, and some that don’t. I have always believed that real estate sales are a perfect match, especially for long distance searches. I wish the web were as well developed as it is now ten years ago, when we were shopping for property in the Ozarks from 2,000 miles away in the San Francisco Bay Area. It would have made the process so much more efficient for us as buyers, as well as for the several Realtors we worked with who had to waste a lot of time ferrying us to properties that were not suitable for our needs. I preached the benefits of using the ‘net in all of the seminars I gave to Realtors around Arkansas, Missouri & Oklahoma.

It seemed like the real estate profession had been slowly but surely adopting the web. That’s why I was disappointed to read this article that claims the National Association of Realtors is backing away from its policy of making more information available to the public. In a move that can only be described as paranoia, it sounds like they feel threatened by this openness and are retrenching and trying to prevent the public from having free access to too much information without having to work through licensed Realtors.

Any profession that is so paranoid as to try to force clients to get information through them, including some in the tax practitioner community, is doing a disservice to its clients. I agree with David Coursey that the web is too pervasive to allow such a monopoly to succeed. Forward looking Realtors will set up their own sites and leverage it to their advantage without the NAR.

KMK

When It Rains…

As if things haven’t gone badly enough for Arthur Andersen – convicted of obstruction of justice, losing all of their auditing clients, facing years of investor lawsuits – they now have the IRS on their butts for their overly aggressive tax shelters. The security of a Big 8 (what it was when I was in college) CPA firm doesn’t seem as attractive right now.

KMK