After seemingly months of watching this debate go on, its time for me equalize this debate. No disrespect for anyone here is intended. My background as an engineer with an MBA has taught me “nothing” about the RE or loan industry. My experiences from buying two homes and selling one and talking with friends/colleagues have taught me a lot. Powayseller, you are approaching this discussion from a scientific manner, which to put it bluntly is IRRELEVANT. As sdrealtor has stated, this is a industry that is COMPLETELY based on emotion (OK, neg am loans due play their small part). The despicable ad put out by REALTORS that had the wife demanding a place with a realtwhore on speakerphone stating that you can do this is worthy of PhD topic since it IS how RE industry operates. Geeks on the fringes like us may use spreadsheets, statistical models, etc to help make RE decisions, but most people see friends in fancy digs and follow them blindly. That’s why RE prices are now at 10 times avg income.
As for the internet driving 80% of sales I DONT believe it. [I only speak when I’m confident on an issue and this leads to many arguments with co-workers because they never believe me. Unfortunately, even though I’m always right, people don’t trust me because they are either arrogant or they are evoking a self-defense mechanism that is guarding their ego, memory, etc]
Yes, people may look at houses on realtor.com, but that will generate a call to the agent, i.e. a sales lead. Where does Bob generate his leads? Did he game the search engines or pay them to be a top listing? For example, Google search for “Poway homes” delivers many agent websites, some from ads purchased on sides and others from gaming the system. I don’t see Bobs name. But wait. How many people who are looking for an $800K Poway home going to blindly put in Poway homes in Google?? Bob sounds like a number crunching economist who probably saves whales in his spare time and sdrealtor [is he really jim the realtor??] may be destroying north county preserves in his hummer, but the latter two are going to get your house sold. They may not show you 100 homes, while Bob might.
Enough said. Good night!