Dear American Realtors, American Travel Agents Are Thriving

“Travel advisers play a more critical role at the top end of the market.” Those are the words of Cornell professor of services management Christopher K. Anderson to the Wall Street Journal.

That more people require travel advisers than ever, and in more gilded fashion than ever, is a statement of the obvious. Before the internet, travel agents were reduced to spending enormous amounts of time on the phone with airlines booking tickets. Yes, how very primitive.

Would it that American realtors would not just grasp the previous truth, but also view it as the best reason to demand better of the National Association of Realtors (NAR). That’s because the NAR’s aggressive protection of an overwhelmingly dated commission structure restrains American realtors from achieving at the highest level like nothing else.

Whatever freezes the present of commerce can only do so at the expense of a much better future. See the “travel agents” of the past for evidence of what is so blindingly, but also excitingly basic.

The technology that “deprived” travel agents of commissions on ticket sales didn’t put the agents freed of such quotidian daily doings out of work, rather it substantially elevated their work. Implied in travel agents being reduced to breadlines by technology is that they’re rather dense individuals, only capable of mindless, intensely repetitive work of the kind where the creativity frontier is knowing whether the bulkhead row has floor stowage or not. How insulting…to travel agents. This is made evident by the present.

Freed of the rote, the “travel agents” of old have become travel counselors not because of grade or title inflation, but entirely because that’s what they are. Liberated by technology from the mundane, they’ve morphed into rather in-demand experts whose time is so valuable that some literally choose their customers, as opposed to hoping for calls to book a ticket from BWI to MCO.

There’s a myth, one seemingly embraced by the realtor lobby, that technology capable of doing for us will render us jobless, paid much less, or both. Implied in such a backwards view of the world is that wealth is most evident in countries, states, cities, and professions most bereft of technology. Quite the opposite.

Technology that does for us makes us quite a bit more valuable, thus explaining the growing prestige of travel counselors. No longer booking tickets, they’re designing long-term travel plans for individuals, families, and groups, plans that reflect and anticipate the unique needs of their customers on the path to bespoke trips the creation of which well exceeds knowledge of whether seat 9A reclines. There’s a lesson in all this for the American realtor.

The much-needed end of a decades old commission structure doesn’t signal the end for realtors, it signals freedom from an abjectly dated form of compensation that for being dated, is depriving realtors of much better earnings. The simple truth is that just as travel agents aren’t necessary for 99% of Americans to purchase plane tickets, neither are realtors required for a substantial majority of housing transactions that could easily take place online.

Yet as the brilliant evolution of travel planning reminds us, the latter isn’t limited to the purchase of a plane ticket. By extension, great realtor work is about so much more than expensively brokering an exchange that could easily happen online.

As is true with every profession, a lack of technology is the only barrier to its elevation. By shielding realtors from technology’s cost compressions, the realtor lobby is undeniably depriving realtors of the much greater earnings that will be their reward once they’ve escaped the ordinary.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.