Wednesday Thoughts – Getting Rid of IDX, Community, and Fear

A few thoughts this Wednesday that may or may not turn into stories for either the blog or the monthly note.

• How many sides (transactions) does a real estate agent need under her belt before being “reasonably competent”? And how many should he do each year to maintain said competence?
• Fear sells. Don’t buy it. “Policy based on fear may be expedient for politicians and profitable for the media and the security sector, but it is generally bad policy.” In life and in real estate economics, pay attention to your life and surroundings rather than what you see through the national lens.
• Interesting question from a client – are people moving to the (Crozet) community to be a part of it, or to ride its coattails? My answer: it depends; a bit of both. Most of my clients want to be part of something, and that something is the Charlottesville – Albemarle – Crozet community.
• Getting rid of home search. I’m about to turn off home search on RealCentralVA.com. Having the home search feature used to be a competitive advantage. Now it’s not worth $2K/year.
• Consumers – crappy agents are (largely) your fault. It’s a market; if you’d stop allowing crappy real estate photos, those crappy agents wouldn’t have clients. (I’ll probably tone this down for the story)
• Here’s a fun experiment. Take your current mortgage payment and current interest rate and plug it into one of my favorite mortgage calculators. Now change the interest rate to what it was when you graduated high school (me – 1994; 8.5%). Or when you were born (1975; 9.1%). Freddie Mac has a great historical interest table here (archived: 2021).