I have noticed a definite shift in the marketing strategy of Realtors, starting with their Association Advertising campaign. Their whole mantra for the last few years while we were in a seller’s market was to convince the sellers that this was a good time to sell, often helping the process of overbiding a home by enticing buyers to make offers higher than the listed price. While this strategy was very profitable for them it led to the tremendous inflation is real estate prices that resulted in the current debacle.
Now that the market has collapse, they have shifted the focus to the buyers side, stating that the “Real Estate Prices are at an all time low” “This is the time to buy”. Their plan is simple, albeit synical is to help the buyer “low bid an offer” to a seller knowing that the seller has no alternative but to accept the low offer or risk not having an offer for months.
It is no secret that most Real Estate Agents plan when listing a home is to simply put the home in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and wait for a buyer to come office and ask for that one home. They don’t actively market the home, they hardly do any open houses and do not look for alternative ways to be successful.
In this market which they bear a lot of the blame, they like to point their finger to unethical mortgage brokers and real estate investors for the state of the market yet they remain the main culprit of it all in inflating the prices whenever they can. A practice that you can bet they will not abandon in the future.
So will this marketing strategy shift work? Time will tell, however they are the ones to blame for the state of the real estate market and soon will be forced to rethink their ways.
If they spend more time looking at ways to fix what they have done instead of lobbying for silly laws and trying to keep investors from accessing their broken MLS system for expired listings they would have a very powerful institution. Again, time will tell.
