Michael Wurzer About a year ago, I wrote about my repeated failures at predicting agent declines over the last several years. This afternoon, I was reading a post on Read/Write Web called How Decoupled Is The Innovation Economy From The Rest Of The Economy and it got me to thinking about agent counts again. You might think those sorts of numbers are top of mind for me in running FBS, but the numbers tell why they aren’t. Since January, we’ve only seen a .32% decline in membership in existing accounts. Certainly, some of our 100+ MLSs have had some significant decline but, on average, it’s been completely flat. (We’ve also been fortunate to see lots of growth in new accounts.)
Some of this flatness could be from some MLSs using end of year billing but that isn’t likely to be the case for over 100 different MLSs, many of which are sure to have had billing cycles since January. Rather, my belief is there was a big enough decline in 2007 that left 2008 pretty stable. The big question is what 2009 holds in store. Your thoughts?