MostlyGeek

Pat Kitano on the Transparent Real Estate blog has a good distillation of Chris Anderson’s keynote at Nokia World 2007 on the emerging economy of free.

The keynote is a must watch. Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired talks about how abundance is creating the new economy of free. This got me thinking about how abundance has affected real estate and how it will change it forever.

There are a lot of real estate agents and listings. CREA has 92,000 members and NAR has more than 1.2 Million. That’s one agent for every 365 people in Canada and one for every 250 people in the US. Listings are even more abundant.

So where is the scarcity in all this abundance?

The scarcity is in time. The time somebody needs to find the right agent and the right property. Realizing that,  agents need to focus on two things for the win:

1. Be a scarce resource. Differentiated themselves by experience and knowledge.
2. Help people get what they want in as little time as necessary.