Realtor Naiveté

Some of the comment sections on the bubble blog message boards can be pretty brutal towards Realtors. I don’t have any specific experience with Realtors that would lead me to believe any one that I have met were knowingly being dishonest and most that I have met have been mostly frank, especially in the past six months, in describing the slowdown in sales.

Despite the generally favorable experiences I have had with local Realtors, I can’t help but think that about 99% of the time they don’t know what they don’t know. Many Realtors in this market are fixated on the apparently “unique” geographical location of the Shore relative to NYC, or lack of land to build on in the area. (Never mind that Realtor’s in Darien or Short Hills say the same thing to their customers.) What they don’t understand, and I don’t expect them to, is that if, in their opinion, prices rose in Monmouth County because it is close to NYC and the beach, and had until recently been undiscovered, then prices should have remained stable in Sarasota, Florida or Fairfax, Virginia, or Needles, California, or any other town that is not close to NYC and the beach. Most, if not all of the increase in Shore house prices was not due to anything unique about the area. Instead, the increase in prices in this area has been due to the same detatchment from fundamental factors that caused a run-up in prices in areas that very few people would ever want to live.