Thanks for the plug, buddy!
Minimizing the impact of reciprocal links is a natural progression for search engines in an effort to combat link bombing and link spam.
I think that off-topic reciprocal links will get hit the hardest (i.e. say your real estate site traded links with a health food store). I think that
relevant reciprocal links will retain some of their benefit, but only if the page that the outbound link is on is
highly relevant to your site.
There's a bit more to my thoughts on link strategy. You can read about some of it on my
real estate seo blog.
I also have a new site going online sometime in the next few months that is dedicated to swapping real estate mini-articles. At first it will be a free site, then in about one year it will progress to an annual fee site.