The wiki experiment is proving once again to be a success: A reader drafted a new letter in opposition to the RE bail-outs that is far superior to my own. Bravo! You now have two letters to choose from.
Send it to your elected representatives. Send it to Senators Clinton and Dodd. Send it to your local paper. Send it to your local news stations.
6 comments:
Paragraph 3 of the letter: "enthusiasm", not "euthusiasm".
Great letter!
er, i meant "enthusiastic".
While you're all at it (since we've thankfully decided we're not socialists on housing), please write a letter to your Congressperson about the monopolistic behavior, or structure, of the NAR or the MLS.
Arthur Louis hammers the realtors:
"Q: I think you are off-base in your criticism of real estate commissions....
A: That sounds like a classic plan for putting yourself out of business. It ought to be studied at the leading graduate business schools.
Homeowners can be fooled -- witness the fact that many of them still pay 6 percent commissions -- but I can't imagine that any would agree to the arrangement you describe. Even if would-be sellers don't recognize this as a bad deal, not many will have $30,000 in throwaway money lying around.
Try putting such a plan into effect and your competitors, especially the growing legion of low-commission brokers, will eat you for lunch.
Many full-commission real estate agents seem to assume that the world owes them a living. The times they are a-changin', guys. (By the way, can anyone tell me why "they" is needed in that song title?)
Q: If the commission paid by a home seller were cut to 1 percent...
A: I am shocked -- shocked -- to see it suggested that a real estate broker would let selfish interests deprive a client of the chance to buy a home he might really want...
The full-commission agents had a nearly monopolistic lock on the market for years. Now the market is opening up more to discounters, the average commission is coming down, and we may yet see true equilibrium, not the uncompetitive kind that you are advocating."
*******
See it all here:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/01/BUG00OUGIG1.DTL
Or
http://tinyurl.com/yosu8p
when everyone is a realtor it makes for quite a lobby against getting rid of them and their institutionalized job protection for the incompetent. Failed at everything else? Become a realtor!
bad mood today. sorry.
WOW! I have failed at everything else, and I was seriously considering becoming a realtor. That puts things into perspective and makes me realize just how pathetic I really am. Thanks, I think. Now I'm stuck having to decide whether to kill myself or completely turn my life around.
Anyway, what about realtor reforms? We could set up a system where upon entry into the industry you are only allowed to sell homes in the lowest price range, say $100,000 and below and $200K-$300K, which would vary according to a number of factors such as location, home prices, number of homes, number of realtors, etc. OK, then for each house sold in that range you make the exact same amount of money regardless of the price of the house. After a certain number of years, sales, or whatever you can move into the next range where you make more for each sale.
We would have the problem of trying determine what the pay would be per sale within each range. Maybe we can get some out of work mortgage lender to help us devise some crazy formula to determine what the realtors new pay grade will be. This is great because not only are we helping the economy by creating jobs for the recently unemployed, but seeing to it that realtors get stuck with an adjustable rate income is sweet, sweet justice.
Hope you enjoy my letter to Senator Dodd.The only response I recieved was an email from him asking me to donate to his run for president.
Dear Senator Dodd
I cannot express how wonderful it is that you will soon be introducing a bill to make sure the tax payers of this great country of ours make sure that none of the poor people who got taken advantage of by the mortgage industry lose there homes to foreclosure.
I have a very good Hispanic friend who really has been taken advantage of. The Mortgage industry swindled him into to buying eleven houses in the Phoenix area in the last two years and he even had to come up with out of pocket cash of almost five thousand dollars. He has a green card and is self-employed and has not filed an income tax return in the last fourteen years. Although he did fib a bit about his income and tell the mortgage people he would be an owner-occupier it doesn’t change the fact that those mortgage people took advantage of him. Please make sure that he gets to keep all the houses even if he can’t make the payments because he is a very good friend of mine.
I was wondering if you could put a little pork in that bill you are sponsoring while you are at it? You see I have a small problem just like my friend who bought all those houses we both like to gamble. He gambles on his houses doubling in value every year. Myself on the other hand am way to impatient to wait a year to double my money so I have been going to the wonderful American Indian casino’s and buying tons of lottery tickets provided by my state and other government sponsored programs. As a result I too am about to lose my home and I think it is only fair that you bail out irresponsible gamblers as well as irresponsible home purchasers.
I want to thank you in advance because I know you will come to my rescue too.
Sincerely
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