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Blogging about real estate occasionally requires me to take my readers “Inside the Brain of a Real Estate Agent.”

This is one of those times.

Sometimes a fellow agent asks me how I expect to sell real estate by putting so much “negative news” in my blog. I answer that question with another question: “Are we in business to help our clients with good advice, or to push them into selling or buying a home – even if it’s not the best time – so that we can make more money now?”

That answer doesn’t endear me.

Then again, I pride myself in making JohnBowmanHomes.com a “warts-and-all blog” – a low-spin zone where prospective buyers and sellers can come to read and hear what they need to know, not what they’d like to hear. If you’re looking for positive platitudes, go somewhere else (actually, practically anywhere else when it comes to Realtor Web sites and blogs.)

I peruse online real-estate sites quite often – especially those of individual agents. In the past few months, I’ve seen the same article – “Five Great Reasons Why Now is a Great Time to Sell Your Home” – appear in at least two dozen places. This tells me two things:

1) These agents aren’t even writing their own material; it’s being cranked out either by a ghost writer or some marketing clearinghouse;

2) These agents have a different answer to the question about why we’re in business than I do. (more…)