The REAL Listing Revolution

In the old days, nobody really expected rental real estate listings to be real.

At least, not the listings by big agencies in newspapers. People understood that they wouldn’t be asking to rent that exact apartment. After all, a million copies of the listing had been delivered on paper that morning to a million people. Of course you understood that if you called on the phone, that THAT unit had rented already. So the agent cross sold you. And you didn’t mind, as long as it didnt’ feel like bait and switch. As long as the agent got you something roughly comparable to what you’d seen in the paper, it was a good deal.

It wasn’t like rental listings were being instantly posted to some magic newspaper you could read while it was being printed.

Then came the Intertubes, and Craigslist, and rental listings were suddenly being posted to a magic newspaper—and each and every unit had a time stamp on it.

This was a game changer for the rental industry. Or, it was for part of it—the smarter, more ethical part.

Suddenly, a new way of doing business became possible. The problem was, how could businesses keep the river of data flowing through their offices current? The answer might seem simple to someone unfamiliar with the industry.

Get a PC. Get MS Access or Filemaker Pro, and start doing data entry!

The problem is, you could go broke, and many places have, doing all the data entry for all the information that is emailed, faxed, phoned, or available via building management company website.

Well, then, you could hire a ton of agents, and make them do it themselves as a condition of employment.

The software infrastructure for this turns out to be a challenge. What’s worse is that every single broker you hire is another opportunity for bad data. Redunancy, inaccuracy, and violations of equal opportunity housing laws. One broker writes that a unit is great for a family with young children, and boom, you just got fined. So you can’t scale the data entry with extra brokers.

So, if you can’t do it as a clerical task, and if you can’t scale the data entry with inexperienced untrained brokers, what can you do?

The answer is BPO—business process outsourcing. Find a trusted third party to maintain the data.

The Boston market needs this solution because of the way it’s constituted. A crazy mix of huge building management companies, super-landlords, and lanlords with one, two or three units. Each building management company works with many agencies. Each agency takes a few bites out of each building management company apple.

Do you want to do 1000 units worth of data entry when you’re only going to rent ten units a year? No way. Life’s too short; especially for brokers with no data culture.

So the end user becomes the impetus for change. They call on a unit the second it is posted. “Can I rent that unit?,” they ask.

The agent launches into the usual story, “well, that unit just rented, but we have plenty like that—”

Click.

“Hello?”

The prospect just hung up. He figures he’s being bait and switched. He can see the unit was posted ten seconds ago. He’s been burned by agents before. He’s gone to the next place. If the agent tells him he can see THAT UNIT, and there are pictures of that unit, he’ll make an appointment.

This is how the REAL revolution starts. Like all revolutions, from the bottom up. From the grassroots.

We’re proud to be a part of that revolution. Some day soon, renters will have the same right to real information that homebuyers using a real MLS have. We’re going to make that happen in this city, in the Boston Metro Region. Other people will make it happen in other cities, in other ways. Real estate is local. Huge franchised operations will not make this happen everywhere at once.

It will grow, as the original Home Sales MLS did, spreading through markets, until the entire market is organized.

Oh, there will still be games, there will still be manipulation, humans being what we are. But it will be much much better than the fake listing system we use now.

Renters deserve the same courtesy given buyers. REAL Listings. It’s going to happen. Soon.