There’s always something to howl about.
Don’t blame me for this, pin the blame on Matthew Hardy.
Note that if you happen to be the constantly-besieged president of a beleaguered trade association, I will be in Las Vegas on Monday, November 12th. I can show you how to get out in front of all these ethics complaints.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
I caught this bit from the GeekEstate Blog in my feed reader.
That’s the list of weblogs in the suitable-for-framing map of “Real Estate Web 2.0” produced by the 1000Watt Consulting group, a consortium of people who make money by not understanding the difference between wattage and luminosity.
Notice anyone missing? It’s not just us. Curbed can’t find a parking space. Rain City Guide is left out in the rain. Even Bert and Ernie, who have been everywhere, can’t make it here.
We get snubbed from dumbass beauty contests all the time, and I take a certain kind of delight in it. First, nobody has to be told what is going at BloodhoundBlog — or anywhere else that matters. And second — and this is especially rich — the essence of Web 2.0 is that no one can tell you what does or does not matter. The first middle-men to be disintermediated by Web 2.0 were the would-be arbiters of taste.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Mortgage Grader is a consumer-operated, automated underwriting system. Jeff Lazerson, its founder, has been working on this idea for 3-4 years. It was released this summer.
Consumers enter information and are issued an approval. The mortgage grading engine mashes up various automated underwriting systems (FNMA Desktop Originator, proprietary sub-prime engines, etc.), searches out the best terms, and delivers the equivalent of a wholesale lending approval, with wholesale rates, to the consumer. The consumer then hires an approved mortgage broker to package the loan for a flat fee.
Have we heard this idea before? Jeff Corbett has been talking about a transparent underwriting and rate search engine for some time, now.
I know both Jeffs. I met Jeff Corbett last year and have known Jeff Lazerson, since 1997, when he was selling his book, “How to Make A Fortune In Loans Without Leaving Your Desk“. Both are veterans of the industry who have seen mortgage consumers get raked over the coals by originators.
Transparency is nothing new to the mortgage industry. Mortgage brokers have practiced transparency, by law, for years. Mortgage originators often teach customers how to lower their fees by accepting a higher interest rate in exchange for lender-paid yield spread premium– I’ve done that since the mid 90’s.
Transparency is the law for mortgage brokers. Flat fee loan originations are nothing new. Innovation Mortgage has been offering a flat fee model for 6 years now.
Is this the end of the full-service mortgage originator? Absolutely not. Technology, while useful, is the consumer’s worst enemy. Ten years ago, mortgage originators feared that Desktop Originator would eliminate their utility. It was the advancement of technology, however, that allowed for more innovative loan programs. The only way for these technology engines to work is if we revert back to the “good ol’ days” of two loan programs: 30 year fixed and 15 year fixed. Nobody really wants less choices.
Nothing beats the advice of a mortgage professional. We are the first experience many consumers have with financial planning. Two hours with one of us will help a consumer to better understand Read more
The confluence of events:
Last week I received a lead from our lead generation system. I had only a name and email address: she wanted info on three listings, then two more, then the next day seven more, each emailed separately. There was no contact number, only her email address, and it turned out she wasn’t really in the market to buy, just curious. And: all she wanted were the addresses, was more than a little annoyed – so was I – she had to jump through hoops to get them. Damned REALTORS®!
Monday I was in a meeting to introduce our new company web site, including a new property search engine. The mock up included maps, street view and… addresses! Transparency; terrific! But, no, sorry, that’s not a real fixture. Apparently that’s against the bylaws of one of the five MLSs we deal with; “Besides, we want to give a reason for the phone to ring!” See above.
Then last night – after fifty plus sugared up munchkins – I opened my annual Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors bill, which includes dues for PMAR, OAR, and NAR. Last year it was $343, and this year: $459. For those who dabble in percentages, that’s a 34% increase.
The stated reason: A $100 ‘special assessment’ to OAR:
The Public Awareness Campaign is an integrated program designed to address multiple issues facing the real estate industry in Oregon as a result of extreme changes in the real estate market including the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the threat of an initiative petition to give unfair advantage to a new MLS provider and the ongoing threat of a real estate transfer tax.
The Public Awareness Campaign special assessment will accomplish two goals – it will fund the specific campaign to raise the profile and enhance the image of our Members [sic] in the eyes of the public, and it will make available the necessary funds to educate the public regarding initiative petition issues that impact the real estate industry and consumers in Oregon.
So that’s a $2 million confiscation, not to study and/or implement ways to make agents more efficient, to make us Read more
The other day Cathy asked me what a semi-conductor is. It takes courage to ask me an open-ended question, because you risk getting the full answer. We started with integrated circuits, which is what most people mean when that say “semi-conductor,” then got into the conductive properties of metals and minerals, slid from there to quantum physics and electron tunneling, jumping to the idea of electronic gates, which leads back to Boolean algebra, all of which briefly encapsulates the idea of contemporary computer science.
But: The role of semi-conductors in all this is relatively recent, so we talked about Pascal’s automated looms, Babbage’s Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace’s invention of software engineering, Turing’s Enigma and the idea of the Turing machine — which, despite all the hype you read, is the underlying engineering for the computer in front of you right now, scaled up a bazillion times.
The Turing machine was mechanical. The role of semi-conductors in data processing came even later than that. So: We talked about integrated circuits, about Moore’s Law and most importantly about the information explosion, the practical corollary of Moore’s Law. We continued with the idea of the Semantic Web, the notion that, very soon, instead of you trying to find the data you want, the data you want will avidly be trying to find you.
There’s more: We talked about multi-core computer processors and their implications, particularly about their application in compute-intensive functions. As a matter of physics, there is a finite limit to Moore’s Law. Heat is a significant problem right now, but even postulating computers running immersed in liquid nitrogen, data moves at the speed of light. At some point, no matter how close together chip-makers manage to plant circuits, propagation delay will limit further speed increases.
But this is where massively-parallel multi-core processors come into their own. Imagine not two cores, or four, or eight — the most you can buy in a computer store right now. Imagine 64 cores, or 256, or 1,024 microprocessors running side-by-side, splitting jobs up into 1,024 separate tasks and performing all of them simultaneously.
There’s even more at the outer edges of Read more
I’ve been saying this for a long time: Buyers are temporarily interested in listings. Owners are always interested in their homes. Zillow.com wants buyers, hence the move to accept listings feeds. But what they really want are owners, people who will come back to the site again and again, potentially to be sold new stuff every time they come back.
Remember 13 months ago when Zillow opened up and let sellers create Do-It-Yourself Zestimates, detailing all the unZestimated changes they had made to the home?
Today all that data gets put to use. Zillow has a brand new advertising program called Home Direct Ads that will use every bit of the data it has collected to target market ads to particular buyers, to vendors like movers or remodeling contractors — even to visitors to specific homes in the Zillow database.
From the company’s press release:
Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow® Home Direct Ads, a new set of patent-pending tools that enables advertisers to identify and connect online with homeowners who are on the verge of making major home-related purchases such as moving or updating the home they currently own.
The sophisticated toolset capitalizes on Zillow’s most compelling asset: data-rich, individual Web pages for more than 70 million U.S. homes that attract regular visits by the homeowners themselves. Zillow Home Direct Ads helps advertisers target ads to these homeowners by individual address, by value of their home, by psychographic cluster such as urban families with children, or even by whether they are planning to move. This type of intent and address-specific targeting has never before been available for advertisers online.
“What we’re offering advertisers is pin point accuracy on the purchasing intentions of homeowners, including the ability to forecast that they are highly likely to move or remodel well before they start the process,” said Greg Schwartz, Zillow vice president of ad sales. “Our advertisers can target ads down to the specific address or home value, or learn other facts about the neighborhood and locality that will allow them to tailor ads directly to this audience. As a result, advertisers are Read more
I have no idea if published Letters to the Editor are covered by copyright protection – if they are I will need to stop doing this. If someone were to suggest that there was a pattern to the types of letters Inman News chooses to publish (say, for example, that I’ve made assertions like that in the past) a person wouldn’t have to wait very long to find examples of that pattern. This one is from today:
Higher commissions are ‘anti-consumer’
Dear Editor:
Are semantics clouding the real issue? When you have thousands of real estate agents competing for a limited amount of business this is construed as competitive, just as Realogy and RE/MAX suggest. However, this does not equate to competitive real estate models, which should — but do not — benefit consumers.
In this agent’s opinion, the issue is not whether there is competition between agents to obtain business — it is the competition as it relates to commissions that have these companies on edge. This should be considered “anti-consumer,” not necessarily an anti-competitive issue, which is simply a case of semantics.
These companies readily admit and demonstrate that they will do and say almost anything to thwart competition with regard to commission dollars.
How many times do they have to say that they are worried about the pressures of lower commissions? It is well documented and stated by these companies that they spend inordinate amounts of money to attract business, thereby placing them in a position where they cannot compete with other models that use pricing (commissions) to compete with the “anti-consumer” real estate models that hire thousands of agents and spend millions of dollars to obtain market dominance.
Ironically, these “anti-consumer” companies are honest about the reasons they continue to frustrate a decline in commission rates. They cannot “compete” within these confines. This is about commissions, not competition to attract business.
What the public should consider is whether they want to do business with companies that knowingly take advantage of their mere size as opposed to finding ways to lower the costs and becoming more efficient when it comes to actually selling homes. Besides higher Read more
Take a look at this map:
That’s the route from my home, in North Central Phoenix, to Johnson’s Ranch, a master-planned community in Queen Creek, AZ. The distance is 55 miles by the odometer, but travel time is more like two hours. It’s a brutal, awful trip, over two-lane roads for the last third of the ride, interrupted once a mile by four-way stop signs. In traffic, each one of those four-way stops could account for ten minutes of your travel time. An accident or an over-heated car could drive your trip time up to three hours or more.
What can we say with absolute certainty about Queen Creek?
How about this? It isn’t in Phoenix.
Johnson’s Ranch isn’t even in the same county as Phoenix.
So why, when the New York Times wanted to slime the Phoenix real estate market — why would it do so from Queen Creek?
How about because the real estate market in Queen Creek is astoundingly bad, and — unless you live here — you won’t know you’re being had.
Don’t confuse yourself. Skyharbor Airport is eleven minutes from my house, right in the heart of town. No one could fly into Phoenix, then drive through mile after mile of cattle-scrubbed desert to Queen Creek, and manage to confuse the two. The purpose of the article was deception, the same kind of slimy deception “professional” journalism has been able to pull off forever — until now.
Want proof? The Associated Press pulled the same stunt earlier this month.
I’m not being a pollyanna. The real estate market is rough right now in Phoenix. But it is a whole lot better than it is in Pinal county. Conflating the two is not an error of knowledge, it is a deliberate falsehood — just exactly as false as talking about single-family homes in New York selling for $350,000 — which I would imagine you could obtain 55 miles southwest of Times Square.
In any case, I’m not talking about these particular lies but about the pattern of lying, about the pre-canned story lines mainstream journalists try to foist off as “news” — until very lately with no Read more
In 1991, I was approached by Garry Fairbairn (he must have been a beautiful baby) of the Western Producer in Saskatoon (or maybe it was Regina), Saskatchewan, Canada to write a simple batch global search and replace utility that the paper could use to translate American wire service copy to King’s English spellings — color to colour, favor to favour, etc.
That was the birth of Torquemada the Inquisitor. Ultimately it came to be much more powerful, but, in the beginning, it did nothing but search for and replace string literals. I was developing a reputation as a Macintosh software developer who was interested in big text-processing problems. There was a good reason for this: I had big text-processing problems and I wrote software to solve them. Torquemada used the then-new drag-‘n’-drop technology in the Mac OS to permit users to run an unlimited number of pre-saved search sets on an unlimited number of text files. If you could write well-defined, error-trapped searches, you could automate a big chunk of your workflow.
Subsequent versions added wildcard searches, type-casting, wild strings, case-conversion, etc. Torquemada was pattern matching along the lines of the Unix GREP utility, but it was optimized for repetitive tasks common to text-processing, word-processing and typography. It was very useful in the early days of web-page creation, as well.
I named it Torquemada because I had already written a utility called XP8 (expiate, get it?). This was built to correct a huge number of defects common to word processing files in those days. In addition, it would pre-code text to be imported into QuarkXPress — then and now high-end Macintosh desktop publishing software — with many typographic refinements coded into the text on the fly. XP8 would remove the excess white space from around the numeral “1,” for instance, intelligently ignoring the lining figures in tables. It did quote-conversion better than any software before or since.
These two utilities had fairly similar objectives, and both were built expecting to do huge batch jobs by drag-‘n’-drop. XP8 was a brute-force front-end to Quark, though, where Torquemada was a general purpose text revisionist. In practice, for Read more
Bruce Hahn writes another letter to Inman News. Of course it gets published, Bruce’s letters always get published on Inman News. I’ve posted about Bruce before, in this post and
in this one. It is a big secret who pays Bruce. He likes to advance the idea that it doesn’t matter who pays him, only the viewpoint he is forwarding is what matters. I don’t buy it. Say what you will about NAR (I do:-) but how they get their funding isn’t a secret. What agenda they are pushing, or why, isn’t a secret either.
I want there to be a record of Bruce’s letters. Some day it will eventually be obvious who has been paying Bruce to write these letters and paying him to not tell anyone who they are. In the meantime, here is his latest:
Dear Editor:
Given NAR’s concerns about the objectivity of the Justice Department’s competition and real estate Web site, I checked the consumer education section of NAR’s Web site to see how NAR’s descriptions of the features of the various real estate brokerage business models compared with those of DOJ. I couldn’t find any information at all on any of the real estate brokerage business models on the consumer education section of NAR’s site. This is curious since you would think educating home buyers and home sellers about the various types of real estate brokerage business models and their features would be a great fit for NAR.
I think NAR should stop beefing about DOJ’s and FTC’s efforts to educate consumers about the various real estate business models until it has something superior to offer. NAR has among its membership traditional and minimum-service brokers, EBAs and many other business models. It should appoint task forces, with every segment equally represented, which would be asked to work together to develop objective consumer education materials on the various alternative brokerage models home buyers and sellers might wish to consider.
For even greater balance NAR might also seek input from some of the other real estate brokerage associations and consumer organizations interested in this area. This would give NAR the opportunity to both Read more
[I was just finishing this up when I read Greg’s terrific post. Timing in life and all that…]
My first jaunt into online polemics was in the early nineties, the topic animal rights. The Animal Liberation Front was active in the Northwest – burning fur farms and research labs to prove the efficacy of their argument – and my (then) wife was involved with the breeding and showing of dogs, the kind of thing that worked a True Believer into lather.
Then, of course, it wasn’t blogs, but newsgroups – talk.politics.animals, as I recall – and it should come as no surprise that conversations tended to get a little, well, testy. I actually took a moderator position for a short time, part of my job to write, every third post or so, a plea of the “Can’t we all just get along?” variety, which would settle things down, but never for much longer than twenty minutes.
[One can tolerate only so much. A reader had logged in to pour out his heart: He was a teacher in a middle school that, for a fundraiser, had staged a pig kissing contest. The kids loved it, but the teacher was traumatized by the humiliation caused the pigs; he’d gone home and cried himself to sleep. What could he do to make others understand? I was asked to step down due to the insensitivity of my reply.]
Turning someone already steeped in the dogma is impossible, but there are tools available to convince the fence sitters: The first thing I did was read the literature, then I downloaded and printed out – I still have the somewhat yellowed copy within arm’s length of where I type – a list of forty three logical fallacies.
Dialogue requires order.
====
Unfortunately, the web and blogs have managed to define discourse down even further. And – who’d have thought? – it’s even beginning to infect RE blogs. I think that’s why Rain City Guide’s Dustin Luther issued his preemptive admonition, brilliant in its brevity: Attack ideas, not people; no personal promotion. All’s well, and RCG continues to be one of the best in quality dialogue.
Then Read more
I live in an amazing world, which is to say a world by which I am continuously amazed, without boundary or graduation.
Here’s an example: I cannot for the life of me understand why National Association of Realtors President Pat Combs has not called me personally to ask me to come to Las Vegas for the convention to tell the NAR what it’s getting wrong.
Now you may think that’s an amazing hubris on my part, but in fact I am the obvious candidate for the job. Redfin.com’s Glenn Kelman is the only plausible alternative, but he is too much at odds with traditional real estate to qualify. I, on the other hand, am — on paper at least — the pot-bellied poster-child of the NAR — GRI, ABR, CRS the hard way. Add to that that I have spent many hundreds of hours detailing what’s wrong with the NAR, and have built a national platform from with to promulgate those arguments and, from my point of view — from Planet Cluetrain — the invitation should have been forthcoming months ago.
But there my amazement does not end. For, upon receipt of such an invitation, I would have to decide what to do about it. It wouldn’t be an easy choice. I think I might love to do it — on my birthday, no less — particularly if the audience were very hostile. But I don’t see that there could be any enduring benefit to it. If Pat Combs had ever even heard of the Cluetrain, she wouldn’t have any need to hear from me.
A nicer way, and I could do this easily enough, would be to go in and talk about the exciting world of Web 2.0 — and it seems likely to me that someone will be doing just that at some breakout session or another. And this will be just as stupid and pointless as the Inman BloggerDoggles, where earnest, well-intentioned people try to talk about community while a horde of congenital note-takers scribbles down tips on how to fake sincerity to snag more leads.
“The world sorts itself out” is what Read more
Not so much, despite a prank posting on the realty.bot’s forums:
Zillow will be shut down on Nov 2nd
Their revenue stream is in concert with the real estate market. They simply ran out of money.
Hence no price updates for over a month.
The Cluetrain runs on Saturdays in Seattle, so David Gibbons rushed in to quash the rumor (once I had asked for a comment, I should add):
OK, OK – Zillow is not shutting down.
Quite the contrary. I’m sorry that Zestimate updates are delayed – there’s a sticky post in the Zillow forum that explains this further. The short story is that we’re preparing for a massive update to Zestimates and data – and have had to freeze site data while that project is ongoing. I understand that it’s frustrating and ask for your patience for a little while longer.
Financially, the company is very healthy – but thanks for your concern. Yep, Homer; we did just raise a 3rd round of venture Capital – $30M – for a total of $89M to date. Ad sales at Zillow are better than expected – please remember to support our advertisers!
New data will be on the site shortly – and much more cool stuff will launch over the next 3 months. We’re not going anywhere.
The rumor was obvious bunk, but it’s cool that it shook some news loose from the Zillowtree.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
This is the 2nd in the series. I am just getting started – you will want to collect the entire set.
