“JWM in SD, you seem to think that every Realtor know every area like the back of their hand. However, I don’t think that’s reasonable to expect. sdr have always been focused on NCC.”

You are misunderstanding my point. My point is that you do not have to be an expert in any particular area to have this coming years ago. In fact, I would argue that the so called experts were far too close to their individual markets to see the Big Picture. Hence the myopia that existed creating a vacuum that allowed for non-experts to fill the void in the RE Blogs.