tighs

Fred Glick quite poignantly takes on ARG’s Listing Syndication boycott with an excellent defense of sites like Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com.  He exposes ARG’s refusal to list homes on these sites not as “protecting intellectual property,” but as downright fear of transparency, and ridicules Jim Abbot, who suggests that listing your home through syndication leads to rape and murder, because a property was posted to Craigslist.  (scams notwithstanding, “lol”)

Instead, Glick points out that these three sites are probably the three largest national real estate listing websites, and owners and agents would be foolish to opt out of ever-increasing online visibility.  In fact, the sites do endanger some of the easy jobs typically provided by real estate agents, by being a “3rd party” and “brokering” deals.  But, the web is all about disintermediation and disruption, any enterprise that trys the same old information-hoarding, collusive practices is going to be left in the dust like travel agents.

This could be really cool. I use Dropbox extensively in my personal and professional life, in concert with GoogleApps, especially GoogleDocs and of course Gmail. I must say, though Google is getting fearfully large, I would love to collaboratively access files hosted on the cloud through my Google profile.