Contemplative Mood

Contemplative Mood

I’ve been in a contemplative mood lately. Something that happens when the winds of real estate settle into their customary calm around this time of year. Nominally, things slip into the doldrums because people are distracted by the holiday hoopla of the holidays but it’s really just because there’s less inventory. For the time being though, I’m enjoying a little distance from the daily grind.

A nagging notion has been rolling around in my head for quite a while. Maybe it’s a symptom of the bigger anxieties floating around in a world increasingly wired by fear and negative emotion. The uncomfortable feeling I’ve had is that maybe real estate’s growing reliance on tech isn’t such a good thing after all.

I’m haunted by a quote from a former Facebook employee echoing Ginsburg’s seminal line: “I saw the best minds of my generation inventing new ways to make people click on things.” And when I look around at real estate and how it all works these days, I see it headed quickly down the wrong path.

I meet hundreds of people at weekend open houses and because I’m curious, I always ask about their recent experiences looking for houses or selling them. In the past few years, a dominant theme has emerged from all the random sampling I’ve done.

More often than not, people are confused and frustrated. And at a decided loss to explain the process they are going through or have just gone through. They’ve been left in the lurch without any context about how all the separate parts, moving with such dizzying speed, actually fit together into the whole.

They complain about never talking to their agent. How she/he only texts them. About being left alone to fend for themselves on the internet. Or about receiving dropbox links with hundreds pages of reports or inspections without any accompanying explanation. Until a second email arrives asking for electronic signatures on every page to prove they’ve seen it all.

There’s a powerful drive to translate just about everything we do as Realtors into a one-size-fits-all digital format. To go faster and to paint our clients lives by the numbers with unseen algorithms. And boil their decision-making down to a series of 1s and 0s for our own good and supposedly theirs.

It doesn’t help that we live right on the edge of Silicon Valley. Where a huge percentage of buyers and sellers are participants in the larger tech economy that surrounds us. Life and work via the internet is what’s expected here. If you don’t have it you aren’t successful. And if you can’t embrace it – it’s time to get out of the business, the prevailing message goes.