Realtors Hate Levitt

The Freakonomics Blog has an update on Levitt v. The Realtors.

The article included an interesting piece of research by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti which showed that even during a real-estate boom, the typical agent doesn’t make a whole lot of money. Why not? Because the barriers to entry are so low that a hot real-estate market is soon flooded with new agents, who cannibalize existing agents’ profits.

You can have agent after agent in to discuss a listing and every friggin’ one of them is going to take you through the same damn list of comps as if you just landed from Mars. I tried rolling my eyes. I tried standing up. I tried saying we’d been through them with others. All to no avail. Seems they have a little performance anxiety: “We don’t really do very much, so we must share the little homework we do with you. We simply must.” They might as well just tape it to the refrigerator.