To begin with, ?homestore leadership,? in my opinion is an oxymoron with an emphasis on moron! Let?s remember what really happened. Dotcoms in the free market attempted to provide Realtors with a wide variety of real estate related services. Unspoken at first was the reality that most dotcoms believed that they could replace the Realtor, given time. They legally and arrogantly sold investors and to some degree agents and the public that their service was a benefit to consumers. The moronity of their thinking is backed up by their failure to do their research. Had they properly researched the realities of the real estate business they would have realized that real estate is primarily an offline business with enhanced services provided online. Most self-righteously fired their big guns then while scratching their heads tucked tail and ran. A few head cases thought up other schemes and entered the market again with similar results. Realtor.com had won the real estate dotcom wars. Now Realtors were ripe for the picking. Realtor.com fought the dotcom wars under the public relations guise of keeping the Realtor at the center of the transaction, and to some extent they did that, but here is where management, (I am loathe to call them leadership) was faced with a fork in the road. Shall we meet with agents and ask them to participate in both conceptualizing a Realtor.com that would serve their and their clients interests, or should we (the new crowned grand pubas of real estate) make the important decisions and pass them ?down to the agent peons?? It didn?t take long for the pubas to decide that one! It would have been quite easy to cut the agent in on the revenue stream for listings they provided. It would have also been easy to build into the Realtor.com website agent and client ideas. Agent loyalty to Realtor.com would have then been very strong and participation would have been very high. In my opinion the pubas blew it. When poor decision making and the increased speed of hyperculture combined, it magnified the mistake significantly, and resulted in Realtor.com and HomeStore being pounded by the baby of the invisible hand, the invisible fist. Unfortunately, from this agent?s perspective, management is still clueless. Why? I believe it is because management are industrial age thinkers attempting to ply their centralized bureaucratic policies in a decentralized silicon world. The net is the largest and most powerful machine on earth. The architecture of the net is clearly one of decentralization. Power now flows from the center to the edges. Leadership now means a leveling of authority with unencumbered positive participation by everyone. Smart agents realized this obvious conflict of cultures and developed their own websites separate and apart from Realtor.com, and from my personal experience and what I have heard from large numbers of agents across America, their personal sites are much more productive than those of Realtor.com. Add to this the idea of Broker Reciprocity, where individual MLS?s will now aggregate local listings and make them available for display by individual agent websites locally, I can no longer see a need for Realtor.com. Indeed it will be dark days for the pubas. As for ?Yahoo Pornography,? that apparently doesn?t seem to be an oxymoron by many people. Also, a real American man will always choose a real American woman, absent the sideshows. Finally, think ?grand pubas,? oxymoronically of course!!

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