The pace of closures amongst estate agents appears to be accelerating.

Quotes Rosalind Renshaw of UK news site Estateagenttoday. But there will be a crucial pivot point where the market picks up at a quicker pace than the skeletal industry base will comfortable cope with, putting pressure on agencies and decreasing competition. Thus increasing the cost to the end user; vendors.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that established businesses in the real estate sector are closing at a rate greater than 1% per quarter in the US, resulting in as many as 500 newly unemployed Real Estate agents every month through 2009. The stats indicate that this is an upward trend with unemployment in the sector increasing from 6.2% to 8.4% through the final quarter of 2009.

http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag531.htm

This may be the answer. RealPress.net have released details of the imminent availability of a Wordpress Real Estate plugin that transforms the standard blogging content management system in to a powerful listing tool. With free development sites and a low priced fully featured Pro version, this would seem to be ideal for the new smaller broker or individual Real Estate broker to launch their portfolio on the World Wide Web. Many of these new free agents, embarking on an independent career resulting from the closure of their previous employers or brokerages, will normally be looking at a significant investment in a web presents to compete in the marketplace.

RealPress say that web sites can be created free in less than ten minutes and that the creation and management can be administered by an office secretary or someone with a similar non technical level of experience. Development is aided by a series of videos on the way, designed to show the user a complete guide on using RealPress, Wordpress, Search Engine dynamics and creative marketing ideas.

RealPress Wordpress Real Estate Plugin can be downloaded from RealPress.net