By David Howell | Washington Post
One of the topics generating a lot of buzz — and a lot of consternation — in the real estate business these days is “control.” Everyone is worried about controlling the search process, or controlling the creation, compilation and dissemination of data, and biggest of, control of the customer.
Some in our industry are wringing their hands over the fact that the overwhelming majority of home buyers identify the house they eventually buy on the Internet, and that some of the most popular online real estate portals have wrestled control of the home search process away from us.
We’re worried that we’ve lost control of the listing data that we work so hard to produce, that others have repurposed or misused our data. And the big one is that we have somehow lost control of the customer — they’ve bled off to these national portals, or to mortgage lenders, or heaven forbid, they go and to the transaction themselves.
