REX, a real-estate startup, has accused Zillow and the National Association of Realtors (NAR) of anticompetitive practices, saying in a lawsuit that the two work together to suppress listings from real estate agents who aren’t Realtors.
Oh, wait, never mind. They’re just mad they aren’t part of the cartel. They don’t object to it as a thing.
“Through horizontal agreements, three of the most highly visited hubs — Zillow, NAR-licensed Realtor.com, and Trulia — now provide virtually no visibility to homes listed by brokers outside the market dominant cartel,” the startup’s lawyers wrote in an amended complaint filed in late September. (Trulia is owned by Zillow.)
The underlying issue here is the idea of buying and selling land, and business models based on that. What these outfits should be is leasing agents, marketing and negotiating the transfer of leased parcels of land, not the speculative ownership of something that can’t be owned in any real sense. Owning land is like claiming to own time. And like land, time had no value in the market until it could be divided up for sale.
The value in land was created by everyone else but the nominal owner. The prices that Zillow et al are counting on (and creating in, as we have seen) are more about scarcity than real value. After all, both Zillow and Redfin are going after the same fixer-uppers that have been used as a weak but serviceable first rung on the ladder. They’re going after scarce resources with deeper pockets than the buyer who needs a bargain. Until cities wake up to the fact that out of town speculators are coming back every month for their rents or running an auction every weekend (when open houses are often scheduled) or when the business community realizes they have to pay higher wages to feed these same speculators who are also sometimes the landlord for their businesses…nothing will change.
Surely there is a Grimms fairy tale or something about a town that willingly sacrificed its crops or its children to some outside force that never stopped coming round. That’s what cities are doing today, sending tax dollars out of town (since many city workers have to live out of town), while watching local businesses pay more in rent or to buy property. Higher expenses — rents and payrolls to cover employee living costs — and market competition holding prices steady…
We’ve seen this before but that’s for the workers; the business owner has higher rents or property taxes to pay, all to fuel the speculative economy that doesn’t reward labor or intelligence. The squeeze is just as real.