You Can't Certify Yourself

We had to laugh when we caught sight of this listing. Yup. This Boston City Properties listing has certified...itself. How adorable is that! The meme is catching on out there on the web that CL content needs some sort of third party verification to be worth looking at.

Here's the thing—no realtor can do this for themselves. They are compelled by the culture they inhabit to behave with the standards of that culture. They cannot unilaterally disarm. Any agency who instantly moves towards total honesty and transparency in the rental market will soon find themselves out of business, unless they have exclusive relationships with top notch property owners.

These agencies with the best exclusive properties, the ones with nothing to hide, can afford to behave with integrity and honor. And some of the actually do.

These are the types of agency we've been looking for to build The Boston Realty Hub network of agencies. They're out there. Places who have built up these kind of exclusive relationships. What we discovered during the last five years is that all agencies claim to have tons of exclusives. Going through their databases and comparing them, looking for the real exclusive properties, we've disocovered that very few agencies have more than 5 or 10% of their inventory as exclusive.

This doesn't mean that agencies without exclusive properties don't have merit. Not everyone wants to shop in a boutique.

But, without BRH, without an outsourced business process which includes the efficiencies produced by our company, BRH (not BCP, nice try guys) agencies re-selling commodity properties simply do not have the luxury of fastidious professional ethics.

They can't abide by a TOU at CL that allows those who most pollute the digital commons to succeed, while they fail. So they don't .

So we're doing our best to change things on the ground, to make transparency profitable. We want to make the good guys win. We think it's an admirable thing. We're willing to work like crazy, barely breaking even on our operations, for years and years, to get this ball rolling. And it is rolling. We can see it moving, every day.

We live in interesting times. And that's not a bad thing.