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Category: Disintermediation (page 37 of 43)

September 21, 2006

ZillowNews round-up . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Under the Zillow: The Tax-man cometh…

My two favorite bits, in two days of coverage:

Lenderama doesn’t need accuracy, he needs a Zillow-based tickler to stay in front of his clients.

MyZillow allows you to make “estimates” of what a property is worth. The estimate takes Zillow’s data and adjusts for specific information you know about the home. Then they generate a monthly email letting you know what those values are doing, while adjusting for your estimate.

Mortgage Brokers are in a unique position to make these estimates in a way that real estate agents cannot. Every time a broker does a refi, they can use the appraisal to work up the estimate to match the real value. Then you can save that estimate in MyZillow. You get a monthly report on that homes value. Now you know about how much the home has appreciated, and how much of the mortgage is likely paid off. With this data, you have a pretty good idea of your existing client base’s equity, and can market to them accordingly.

Based on this information, you could send out reminders that they may have reached 80% LTV, and should look into getting their MI dropped. Or, you could send out offers on HELOC’s, or Cash Outs. You could give them a heads up that properties are dropping in their neighborhood. Whatever you do, it’s just another way to help keep in touch with past (and hopefully future) clients.

Sheer brilliance.

And Sellsius&176; points out that Zillow.com has drawn a bright red circle around its own Achilles’ Heel:

If an owner gets to change the zestimate, guess what? It sits there right next to Zillow’s. Now what? Now we really need a professional more than ever to untangle these worms.

Overnight Zillow has gone from a veil of pseudo-scientific infallibility to a side-by-side pissing contest that can only be settled by a professional referee.

Nice going…

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September 20, 2006

Kitchen remodel: $10,000. Bathroom addition: $7,500. Ocean view: Priceless . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Kris Berg at The San Diego Home Blog:

I have met with sellers who were quick to point out that they have an ocean view. From the guest bath. While balancing precariously on a stack of books. In high heels. With a telescope. Do you think they just might add the “water view” description to their property?

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September 19, 2006

How many battalions does Google have . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From Google Blogoscoped, Google has pulled the plug entirely on the Belgian newspaper that is suing it for theft of content. Whatever the merits of the case, acting out of caprice or spite while a judge’s gavel is poised over your head is dumb. This could be the tech’s Maginot Line, where Web 2.0 meets Government 0.99…

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September 18, 2006

Is Real Estate 2.0 nothing more than a cabal of cheaper and more-efficient moral midgets . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’m up to my elbows in Ajax (“You’re soaking in it!”), but I don’t want this to get washed away in the suds: With respect to Redfin’s assertion of propriety, Kevin Boer at In The Trenches (blogrolled) provides a plausible explanation for how Redfin might be so adept at identifying impropriety.

An idea has been bugging me, and I don’t know what to do about it. Realtors are too much identified with The Real Estate King, the cheesy, sleazy used car salesmen. But there is another image of the Realtor, one among those we used to call The Better Men — maybe stodgy, maybe stuffy, but a man of firm and fixed principles. Real estate 2.0 (come and get me!) might bring us greater efficiencies, but if it brings us even worse behavior — how is that a benefit? Zillow.com whispers the truth and shouts the lie. The listings aggregators steal content like bums in Grand Central Station mining the coin returns on pay-phones. And Redfin.com seemingly devotes its every living moment to making street criminals look like men of character. This is not an improvement.

If you think about this at all, please think carefully. I am up to my elbows in Ajax — with which I intend to cleanse Phoenix of every last greasy remnant of The Real Estate King. But we gain absolutely nothing if we remake our industry as a cabal of cheaper and more-efficient moral midgets. The realty.bots might be famous and they might have a lot of money behind them. But if they are our future, we might as well have changed nothing…

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September 17, 2006

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…is up at BlueRoof.com Blog. Our Lady Pompeia is in attendance, along with 30+ other articles on state-of-the-art real estate.

Mark your calendars: We are hosting the Carnival of Real Estate the week of October 9th. Whet your mind, sharpen your pencil and bring your A-game: I have a taste for the astounding, confounding or aboundingly profound, and I’m a tough grader. (The Leggy Blonde is a soft-touch, if you want to try apple-polishing.) But if you bring your best, we’ll do our best to bring it to the world.

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September 16, 2006

Ask the Broker: Where can you go to get the most accurate estimates for real estate?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Who can best judge what a piece of real property will sell for?

We all know the answer to that: The best estimate of the value of real estate will come from an experienced real estate appraiser, preferably one with a lot of experience in the neighborhood where the subject property is found.

After that, a Broker’s Price Opinion — same stipulations — will come second. In certain very homogenous neighborhoods, a Broker’s Price Opinion may be just as accurate as a full appraisal — and a lot cheaper.

Third place belongs to an experienced agent’s Comparative/Competitive Market Analysis. This can be very accurate in homogenous neighborhoods, substantially less so in areas where the homes or lots differ significantly from property to property.

Last place goes to the results produced by an Automated Valuation Method such as Zillow.com or NetValueCentral.com in the Phoenix area. I have written a lot about the defects in Zillow’s methods and practices, as has Sellsius&176; Real Estate blog. The Cliff’s Notes: An AVM does not evaluate houses, but rather statistics and records about houses. It cannot, for an extreme example, tell you whether the house is still there at the time of the evaluation.

It is fairly common to hear people say that AVMs will get more accurate in time. In fact, there is a finite limit to how much they can be improved. A CMA is essentially an all-paper calculation, with no inspection of the property on the ground. But a CMA is produced by an agent who has a great deal of on-the-ground experience, most of which will never be encoded into an AVM’s software. And nothing that would be considered an unzillowable factor — landscaping, decor, orientation, views, etc. — can ever be automatically accounted for by an AVM.

But: The other end of this question is need versus costs. If you want to know what your supervisor’s house is worth — use Zillow.com. It costs nothing, and close enough is good enough. If you need to know what to offer on a house you want to buy, you need a CMA at least. The good news is, your Read more

September 14, 2006

Ask the Broker: Why would an MLS/IDX system forbid commingling with listings from other sources . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Giving my prominent proboscis a good hard tweak, a certain pseudonymous Scarlet Pimpernelesque semi-retired real estate weblogger asks: “Are you trying to say that the MLS’ are not fascist dictatorships???” The question refers to a weblog entry I posted last night chastising Trulia Blog for hyperbole in its complaints about MLS exclusivity. I actually have a lot, lot, lot to say about MLS disintermediation — but not now. For now, I’d like to take a swing at the issue Trulia raises, treating it more seriously than they did.

Here is the relevant rule from the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service’s IDX policies and procedures:

12. An IDX Broker may not modify, enhance or manipulate a Shared Listing. In addition, listing information from other sources may not be combined with IDX Listings. For instance, property listings from other multiple listing services, for sale by owner properties and properties not in the MLS may not be combined with the IDX Database.

Why would ARMLS have such a rule? I can offer some reasonable conjectures, but before I do, I should like to make a meta argument: Whether or not you agree with anything I might say, it remains that MLS systems have every right to make their own rules however they choose. If the rules make sense to the membership, they don’t have to make sense to you. In other words, quibbling with me, here, gets you nowhere.

So why might an MLS IDX system forbid commingling with listings from other sources?

How about to protect the MLS brand? Or to avoid confusion between fully-cooperating listings and de facto exclusive listings? How about to preserve the cooperative system that is the sine qua non of MLS listing?

Here’s an even better reason: To maintain the quality level of displayed listings. We make fun of MLS listing quality, but egregious listings are funny precisely because they stand out (which is what egregious means). MLS listings are amazingly detailed compared to FSBO or RealtyBot listings. The simplified ARMLS feed, which any agent can download on-line, contains 213 unique fields — and it excludes the photos, their captions, the virtual-tour link and Read more

September 13, 2006

Bedtime links: Lawyer-free real estate, Zillowing Redfin, dancing with the dinosaurs, the map to mash-up excellence and memorable truths about Real Estate 2.0 . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Christine gives a nice run-down of seller-only agency as it is practiced in New York State. This is not very far from the way things used to be done in Arizona, except that, because of Article 26 to the state constitution, lawyers are not required to effect the transfer of real property.

Sellsius° whispers a plan for Zillowing Redfin.

Daniel is swinging for the fences, and he plans to look at at least one more pitch. The topic: NAR, MLS, IDX, VOW, DOJ (wasn’t that a song in Hair?). I think this is a classic example where doing nothing would have resolved the whole problem within a few months: NAR implements VOW policy as planned with opt-out provision. Dinosaurs opt-out. Young turks counter-market: “Why are they hiding your listing?” Dinosaurs opt-in. What we’ll get, eventually, will be years late and much worse.

Joel kicks the tires on the Windermere map mash-up: Windermere’s Property Point hits a home run.

We began this day with a thoroughgoing article from The Realty Bloggers about Real Estate 2.0 that happened to say nice things about BloodhoundRealty.com. We’ll end the day the same way, with a rigorous call to arms from Mike Price at Mike’s Corner that also says some nice things about BloodhoundRealty.com. Saying nice things about us is incidental. Saying true things memorably — this is irreplaceable…

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September 13, 2006

Is Windermere’s the best MLS map mash-up so far . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dustin at Rain City Guide is pointing to this new Windermere MLS map mash-up.

“Ho hum,” you say. “Been there. Done that. Gave the tee-shirt to my kid.” Maybe so. My take is that this is the best map-based MLS search that I have seen so far, but I am not confident that I have seen it all.

Things I like:

  • Almost no wasted screen real estate
  • A super-accurate zoom feature
  • Excellent Ajaxification without waiting between every change in settings
  • Details are exhibited in a tabbed section using about 25% of the browser

The sliders at ShackYack.com are very cool, but they’re painful to use because everything refreshes in real time — plus ShackYack wastes huge portions of the screen, as do Trulia.com and PropSmart.com. Are there any other players in this same league?

Windermere has MLS feeds from wherever it has franchisees — 35 systems so far, mainly in the Western United States.

Go play with it. My take: Totally rocks…

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