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ABSTRACT
Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, this paper examines the market work performed by real estate agents in a residential market. The research explores how agents are engaged in market work to sell themselves, the market and the products in order to sell houses. Agents first invest in the clients by self-presentation techniques (likeability, availability, appearance, taste). They also work to bring the clients in line with the market by making them accept the market and its hierarchies; and finally, they enable clients to conform with the market, by relying on prices as signals and taste hierarchies. They act as market devices contributing to market valuation as they are engaged in making residential choices emerge, balancing the cold reality of the market with warm relationships to foster clients' engagement in transactions.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Eliza Benites-Gambirazio received a PhD from the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona, USA in May of 2019. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (Centre Max Weber, University Lyon 2).
Notes
1 In the definition of Cochoy and Dubuisson-Quellier (Citation2013), ‘“market professionals’ are “people (recruitment experts, consumer activists, distributors, etc.), occupations (marketing, design, packaging, etc.) and devices (press consumer guides, standards, etc.) whose task is ‘to work on the market”, i.e. to construct it, move it, organize it, manage and control it – in short ‘agencing’ transactions’ (p. 1).
2 House as a ‘placement’ not only because of its economic cost but also because of the reproduction strategies it involves. ‘The house is inseparable from the household as a sustainable sociable group and the collective project of perpetuating it’ (Bourdieu et al. Citation1990, p. 6).
3 In residential markets, agents are located at the center of all interactions, between the buyers and the sellers, but they are also a connector between a vast network of professionals such as lenders, appraisers, and service companies (such as cleaning, termite exterminations, roofing, home insurance, security services, pool servicing). Even if a product is not picked by the buyer, the seller's agent can receive feedback from the buyer's agent on what was or not liked by the client. The communication and the negotiation (if needed) happen only between the agent's buyer and the agent's seller. Additionally, agents usually detain access to other market professionals, which are connections that help them make future sales.
4 Through professional associations such as the National Association of Realtors (NAR), real estate agents have worked to establish relative social control of the residential transactions, allowing the entry of agents and the course of transactions to be organized around professional standards and rules. The discursive and practical development of an occupation into a ‘profession’ with the construction of an ‘exclusive group’ equipped with specific devices, ethical behavior and ‘abstract knowledge’ (Abbott Citation1988, 8) serves as a form of symbolic capital that confers legitimacy and provides social closure and autonomy (Bourdieu Citation1990). In my sample, all agents were registered as realtors®. Indeed, crucial resources such as the MLS are provided by the local association affiliated to the NAR®.
5 Bourdieu (Citation1990) conflicts with many sociologists (and even philosophers such as Sartre) whose analysis is driven by a philosophy of the subject. They postulate that actors reflexively know what they are doing, say it and act accordingly. For Bourdieu, the logic of scholastic thought should be replaced by ‘practical logic,’ which proposes a sociologically grounded analysis of the relationship of economic agents to action.
6 Two of my interviewees refused the recorder, but I took significant notes afterward. Interviews lasted between 90 and 120 min each.
7 I use pseudonyms for the companies’ and agents’ names.
8 When asking informally at real estate companies, Star Realty was always mentioned as the ‘only good school’ in the area.
9 To code the interviews, the participant observations and the documents gathered during training and meeting with agents, I used ATLAS.ti, a Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) software. All the codes were generated based on preliminary fieldwork, on specific cues given by interviewees and on the analytical interpretations I made during observations.
10 The relative lack of attention to the credit scoring is evidenced by the specific role and structure of credit institutions which foster access as even temporary worker can obtain loans.
11 Exceptionally, I encountered very savvy buyers, whether experienced through their transactions or investors themselves.
12 A market transaction ‘is always a social act insofar as potential partners are guided in their offers by the potential action of an undetermined group of real or imagined competitors rather than by their mere actions’ (Weber (Citation1922) Citation1978, p. 636).
13 It operates specifically in the middle and high-priced market and does not necessarily hold true in the lower-end of transactions where the product's lack of qualities are euphemized or the product is targeted to a specific audience, whether poorer clients (‘proximity to bus stops’ signals that it is destined to bus users or people without a car) or investors (‘ideal investors’ signals that they would be able to rent it high and take the most advantage of their investments).
14 In this paper, I study the professional pressures faced by agents sell quickly, which can cause significant stress.
15 There was a total of 18 Hispanics and 1 black agent in my overall sample.