Waah! That's the collective scream we hear nowadays from the real estate agents we meet. The market is broken. Online leads stink. My listings won't sell. Buyers are jerks. On and on and on...

Now, I scratch my head and wonder: Why? I don't see too much wrong with the market. Sure, credit is harder to come by for people with low credit scores, no verifiable income and a history of job-jumping - but do we really expect banks to lend to those kinds of characters? Let them continue renting until they're ready - and able - to be a purchaser who can pay a realisting price for a realistic mortgage...

Of course, that assumes there will be homes that are realistically priced in the marketplace. How is it that, just down the street from my house, a listing sold the other day - after being on the market for only four weeks - while another just around the corner has been on the market for almost a year and a half, has had three different listing agencies and no offers? Must be the buyers, right? Weird... because the two homes aren't really all that different in size, features and school districts - they are in the same neighborhood. Hmmmmmm.....

But what do we expect, from buyers who are so mean, they won't even respond to a REALTOR who takes two days to finally get around to replying to them online. Imagine - those buyers are so disrespectful - they won't immediately respond with their credit score, sign an online agency agreement and jump right in the car to go see homes with someone they hardly know. What gives? Why would they take the trouble to go online and look at your listings, then send you an email asking for help as if they weren't ready to just buy the house today, huh? Can't figure it out....

Couldn't be that the listings they are looking at online look worse than the black-and-white photocopies of the good-old-days of the MLS comparables book? Who's to say that lots of photos - never mind that they're too dark or crooked - aren't generating leads? Certainly those mean buyers should have learned everything they wanted to know from the choppy, weird-language writing most REALTORS add to the "description" area of their listings. Doesn't everyone know that their dream home contains "3BR, 2BA and a FROG" by how?

Yet maybe that's all we can hope for, in an industry where the lunatics are frequently left to run the asylum. What's a manager to do - you can't control those stubborn independent contractors! Imagine asking them to follow up with the leads you're giving them? That would be tantamount to asking them to actually prospect for business! And buy a Blackberry. Or maybe just learn their password to the company website so they can upload a few more photos to their listings. Absurd! We've never done that before; there's always been an admin around somewhere to run their labels, send out their mailings, answer their calls, fill out their forms, upload their stuff to MLS. Why not just get someone to be an agent for them? Oh, sorry - we already have that - that's what we call managers nowadays....

So, guess it's a perfect storm. Mean credit-unworthy buyers, stubborn sellers who insist on overpricing their homes and managers who aren't doing their jobs getting agents enough easy-to-close leads.

No wonder the market is a mess.