God, Obama, Superman and Me

Giving Up on the L Word

Looking through the archives, having conversations with agents about their business practice, I realize I've ruffled some feathers. No, I've really pissed some people off by using the 'L' word. Calling anyone who uses databases of representative listings a 'liar.' I've tried to make it clear that there were valid reasons before BRH came around to not maintain a live inventory database.

The pace of change in rentals is breathtaking. Units come in, and are rented, sometimes within hours, sometimes before you can even do the data entry. The commissions are a tenth or a twentieth of those in the home sales industry—so there's a reason there's a MLS for sales and not for rentals.

None of this changes the fact that, if a business now chooses not to invest in our service, and instead uses 'representative' listings, they are now engaged in a process which creates what our new president might call 'misrepresentations and misconceptions.'

If agencies wanted to label this type of system with a disclaimer that read: "These properties are representative of the rental stock we have available. Take a quick look, and then come on down and we'll start making calls and see what we can show you" I'd be cool with that.

You're a part of the REAL listing revolution by being transparent about your process. Explain to people that the pace of change makes maintaining a live inventory non-cost effective. Tell them that so many units are so indistinguisable from each other that it's really OK to re-use photographs and listings. Just do it.

Craig's Button Encourages Misconceptions and Misrepresentations...

When an agent posts to Craigslist there's a button that refreshes each listing's time stamp, shoves it back to the top of the CL pile. Now tell me, you're an agent; you don't get paid to post stuff to Craigslist, you get paid when you move a unit. You do a pile of data entry Monday morning. Those units start renting. Do you take them off Craigslist? Or do you save a few minutes, and just keep hitting the button to send them to the top of the pile?

Lisings posted to CL via our technology never, ever, get shoved back up to the top of the pile. At OMB, the only way a listing gets shoved back to the top of the pile, rises to the top like cream, is when the property owner sends another email or fax listing that unit as being still available.

Could we just refresh everything every day? Sure we could. Some agencies do! They have databases of properties that have last update date of that morning. Every morning.

Huh? How does that happen? Do the landlords call in every morning? All 700 of them? All at 9 am? Does the agency have 700 receptionists? Oh, maybe it's a magical software thing. That's it. yeah, those landlords are all hitting that magical button.

Every morning. At 9 am. They all roll out of bed and hit that button at the same moment. (Perhaps they've been infected with some sort of Borg implant that makes them all one huge hive mind?)

Making the Honest Buck

Anyway, I'm not God (I bet you knew that already). I don't know what is in another man's heart, or mind, when he says something that I know isn't true. He could be very very stupid, or misinformed. He could be insane, or delusional. Maybe Bush really believed there were weapons of mass destruction, even as he cooked up the evidence for them. That's possible.

And ultimately, the agents who may or may not be enagaged in spreading the misconceptions and misperceptions didn't build this system. They're just trying to make a buck in it. Like everyone else. Like us.

But the way we've chosen to make our bucks is to get you, the apartment hunter, real, live, fresh, tasty, delicious rental listings. You can't get them at most realtor sites. You can't always get them at Craigslist. (You might, but then, probably not.)

You can always get them at OMB.

If you see a half dozen properties with the bright green lozenge, something time stamped this morning, you know the owner told us this morning that the unit was still on the market. This wasn't a clinically depressed broker hitting a button on a property he posted five days ago, saving a few minutes work. This is BRH at OMB, data sellers, pushing a fresh listing to the top.

Smell our listings. Take a bite. They're the real McCoy.

You have our word on it.

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.