‘Twas a week before Christmas and on the same day a storm was congesting cities across the country, Inman News held a virtual Town Hall entitled “Road Map to Recovery: Reinventing The Real Estate Industry.“  Brad Inman, Publisher of Inman News, moderated a tele-connected panel of four real estate experts.

As I listened to the conversation and looked out the window, I watched as my street in the San Bernardino mountains west of Los Angeles disappeared under two feet of snow.  It was a reminder of how hard finding our way can be while the crisis continues.

The four participants – Kris Berg, broker-owner with her husband of San Diego Castles Realty; Marty Frame, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cyberhomes; Pam O’Connor, President/CEO of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World; and Pat Stone, chairman of The Stone Group – addressed our industry’s future with insight and as much optimism as they could justify.

Like the storm, the discussion covered a lot of ground and upturned a few comfortable assumptions.  Berg said 2009 would be “more of the same” and Stone, who wrote “A Call for Expertise: De-Cruiting in Real Estate,” warned that an oversupply of commercial real estate under construction for 2009 and ‘10 will be the “other shoe to drop” and push the recovery well into 2011.

“Pricing is not the problem anymore,” he said.  “I think the recession is now the problem.”

Many alternate routes were discussed, but on my second listen (Premium Inman Subscribers can access the program here]), an exit strategy began to emerge.  It will be too obvious for some, too painful for others.  But, clearly, two current forces have now aligned and threaten to spin the weaker agents off the merry-go-round: one, consumers lack trust in real estate professionals and, two, feel a sense of independence and empowerment from access to self-serve listings and other data.

Berg, a regular Inman columnist, has two worthwhile articles: “A Season for Giving Good Service” and  “Making Real Estate Guacamole” (the latter written for the Roadmap project).  She quickly found some silver lining in her dark forecast.

“This market is something that needed to happen,” she said.  “A cleansing process.  We’re going to come out of this I think with a cadre of professionals who are going to serve the industry and our reputation well.  Lack of trust in our institutions is a huge part of the problem and we’re feeding that with this new, wired society.  They don’t necessarily want our opinion and our advice because I think a lot of us gave some bad advice over the year.  So they’re out there on the Internet Googling themselves to death and they’re just on information overload.”

Marty Frame, whose column, “Growing in Times of Turmoil” was also specifically written for “Roadmap”) helped explain that all the fascination with online data is not only inevitable, but the wise agent will take advantage of it.

“People are just fundamentally obsessed with real estate,” Frame said.  “It’s the focus of their personal wealth and has a huge emotional component.  We have to understand that and connect it back to the basic business practices that we have stressed from time immemorial: farming neighborhoods and trying to connect with people.  It’s really no different online than it is knocking on doors.”

“People are really trying to figure out what it all means,” he continued.  “They have access to all the analytics, but want to understand what it means for them.  How does that affect the picture in their neighborhood?  What’s driving the change?  Is now a good time to do whatever I’m thinking of doing?’”

“The huge appetite among consumers for statistics and analysis is the good news in all of this,” said O’Connor, who wrote “Lost Jobs Delay Real Estate Revival“  “We’ve just got to do a better job as an industry of becoming experts.  We really have to talk statistics – and be a lot more straightforward with people.  That means that you have to tell a homeowner what their home value is and not take the listing unless they list it at that price.  It’s all about transparency.”

As the hour drew to a close and the snowstorm seemed to be gathering strength, I thought about the Auto Club and its emergency road service, and then about all the road maps it hands out.  But the real value in Auto Club maps, and the reason we continue to stand in line, is that well-traveled expert who will help design a personal itinerary for us.  That was the message I took from Inman and his panel: once the storm clears, the successful agents will be those who kept on that well-trod path of expert, honest and personal service.