Amara's Law and Real Estate

Too early, too early, too early, too late

I’ve been traveling a bunch and have not had the time to write much. Plus, it has been awfully slow in terms of interesting topics out there. If you think otherwise, help a brother out and send me questions or topics you find interesting.

Having said that, I recently read about some of the goings-on at RISMedia conference happening as I write. And a passage caught my eye. Here it is:

Brian Donnellan, CEO of Bright MLS on the other side of the country, said his organization was staying as tuned in as possible to what concerns—or potentially problematic plans—his subscribers had, going so far as to check out Facebook groups popular with agents.

But he added Bright has so far found the NAR settlement to be more of a “pea gun” than a “Death Star” as far as threat level to the industry.

It caught my eye because I am working on a presentation on how the new rules change the industry. My basic thesis is that it is far too early to know just yet how things will change, but that the change will be far more fundamental than anybody thinks today.

This is known as Amara’s Law in technology spheres. It goes:

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

I think this will apply with full force in real estate. What is vital to consider, is what those underestimated effects in the long run might be.

In order to puzzle out the answer for myself, I figured I would write this since I tend to know what I think about something by reading what I’ve written about it. So let’s go on an intellectual journey full of speculation and hypotheticals.

For the TL;DR crowd (and the unpaid crowd), I’ll put forth my hypothesis: start from first principles, and reason from there. It might not be correct, but it provides a way to think about the long run future.