Realtors at Risk

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"2 deals make $50,000"
Lawrence Dale (opponent of anti-competitive MLS practice)

When I saw this chart of Canadian Realtor Population growth which in the last 40 years has spiked by 336% or six times our civilian population growth of 55%, I am reminded of Marc Andreessen's 2011 quip that "software is eating the world" which lit up the Twitter-sphere and led to a Wall Street Journal article sounding the warning bell to workers who are incorrectly trained and educated. 

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More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There's no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

As data become more accessible, realtor services become less valuable. Have you noticed that most realtors have trouble answering simple questions for fear of being challenged by litigation.

Nearly half of American jobs today could be automated in "a decade or two" according to new research. The Atlantic Jan, 2014

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Here is Thomas Frey (Innovations Editor for The Futurist Magazine) with his view of just a few of the skills (162) that will be highly prized in the future.

Meanwhile in Canada, if we have not already had our brain's drained into a Silicon Valley somewhere, we leave our homes and go toil in the muck of the Athabasca. (Alberta Earnings are 22% above Canada's average - April 2014 data).