How much blame should Realtors shoulder for housing mess?
The Web site ActiveRain always features some interesting debates, often between real estate professionals and consumers.
At least those debates are the most interesting.
The site, which offers real estate agents the chance to run their own blogs and actively promote their listings, has a good debate going on now, one started by real estate agent Karen Parsons-Fiddler on her ActiveRain blog. She titled her latest post: “Anti-Realtors: They blame us, but what about the pool guy?” You can read the post here.
In her post, Parsons-Fiddler argued that real estate agents are getting too much of the blame for the country’s current housing mess. Parsons-Fiddler, as any real estate agent would, argued that real estate agents have actually saved countless customers money over the years by helping them find homes for the right price and sell them for maximum profit.
Of course, ActiveRain being populated mostly by real estate professionals, Parsons-Fiddler’s post was followed by a series of amens.
However, there were a few posters who took the opposite view. They argued that real estate agents, by allowing their customers to pay too much for homes, should take a good portion of the blame for the current housing crash. They argued that agents have been just as implicit in the housing meltdown as have been mortgage loan officers, government officials and greedy consumers.
It’s hard to argue with this. You can’t tell me that agents didn’t know that their customers were overpaying for homes. You can’t tell me that they didn’t know that housing prices had to come crashing down eventually. I mean, how many agents ever told their clients that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a great idea to buy in early 2006, when housing prices had already skyrocketed and were poised to come crashing down?
Did the agents believe everything that the economists at the National Association of Realtors preached, that housing prices would never fall? Perhaps they did.
But if they did, then, yes, they should shoulder much of the blame for the housing disaster through which the country is now suffering.
Of course, the real estate agents aren’t the only culprits. Consumers and members of the media are to blame, too. We didn’t want the housing boom to ever end, when it was clear that housing prices were rising too high, too quickly. We all put on our blinders on this one.
