On Declaring Things Dead

This past August, Teresa Boardman published a piece on Inman News on how the real estate blog was dead. Her point was more intricate than the tag line. In my view, she was decrying how all the noisy bad content was crowding out the small proportion of quality content. It got a fair bit of attention on Active Rain and other platforms, and made for good discussion with the fall season of conferences coming up. 

This past week, Inman republished another piece on something dying, namely map-based home searches. This wasn’t Teresa Boardman, respected real estate blogger noticing all the bad content out there, it was from the looks of things  a software guy with a better thing to sell writing the piece. He wasn’t the only one other than Teresa to use the metaphor. But I hope he’s the last. 

Enough already with the obituaries. The literary device of declaring something in real estate dead should be declared dead. 

There are a number of reasons. 

• The too cool for school technique of predicting the end of something before it ends is tiresome. 
• They’re just wrong. In the example sited, map-based searching will not go away anytime soon, especially as technology improves. I have buyers looking at back yards on Google Earth. 
• Too often, the self appointed coroners have their own agendas.