BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Disintermediation (page 41 of 43)

August 8, 2006

Tell the world: Zillow.com is bunk . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote Debunking Zillow.com on July 25th, two weeks ago today. Without being arcane or technical, I think it completely demolishes the idea that Zillow.com can — or ever can — provide reliable home values. Nathan Hughes at Richmond Business and Commercial News wrote about my post, and, in a comment there, I said:

The Zillow mystique is analogous to the aura that surrounds the nutritional supplements business. No one can possibly confuse a clerk in a GNC store for a physician, but people like the idea of being liberated from the dictates of their doctor while going one up on him at the same time.

We know that Zillow.com rides the Cluetrain, or seems to. When I teased them, they teased back.

Why, then, have they not responded to the much more serious allegation that their base epistemology categorically forbids the very results they promise to deliver? I believe that what Zillow.com does would be actionable professional malfeasance if done by a real estate licensee. If the owners of Zillow.com think I am wrong on one or both points, why haven’t they risen to answer my charges? If they can prove me wrong, why haven’t they done it?

Google me this. Or this. If I am wrong, they need to shout me down right now.

But I’m not wrong, am I? Cum tacent, clamant. Their silence speaks louder than any words: Zillow.com is bunk.

It is the duty of the entire real estate community — and in this company I include the recent dot.com entrants, licensed and unlicensed — to guard consumers from hoaxers, con-men and frauds. I have no doubt that the owners of Zillow.com have the best of intentions. Nevertheless the results they produce are necessarily erroneous — and I have zero doubts that they know it. I think this is a case where everyone who cares about the true value of homes — or simply The Truth in the abstract — should stand up and be counted.

The fact is, if you eat whole bottlesful of the quack nostrums they sell at GNC, nothing will happen to you. The contents are completely inert, with Read more

August 6, 2006

Trulia trooper . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last kiss of my mail for the day. Waiting for me was this, sent at 8:12 PM MST:

Hi Greg,

Thanks for contacting Trulia. Your feed has been received by our engineering team and you can expect to see your listings live within 72 business hours.

Thank you for your patience.

Please feel free to contact me with any further questions,

Susan Raye
www.trulia.com
Customer Service Representative

Jeff took care of me last week, and I’ve been processed at least twice since then, but this is impressive anyway. When Jeff is dishing up feeds and philosophy into the wee hours and when a CSR is punching out pulse checks on a Sunday night — both of them doing this for a non-cash-customer — somebody must be doing something right in management. I hope they have sense enough to reward and acknowledge this kind of dedication. Hard to find, easy to lose, impossible to get back.

Technorati Tags: ,

August 3, 2006

My friend, Richard Riccelli . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My friend and esteemed colleague Richard Riccelli called tonight to talk about the custom yard signs — among many hundreds of millions of other things.

I’ve known Richard since the day I found out that my son Cameron was certifiably enwombed — fifteen and a half years ago (wow!). When the boy was born, Richard was the first person to call him “Cam” — and then right away “Cambo.” I can picture both of those events — meeting him and his applying diminutives to my son — just like they were yesterday.

This is not happenstance: Richard Riccelli makes an impression. He walks, talks and — especially — thinks at a blistering pace. He throws off ideas the way the rest of us shed skin cells, dozens a minute. When he is focused, he is so much like a laser that you expect his eyes to burn through paper — through tables, walls, concrete. When he lets his mind float freely, he can glance pinball-like across a universe full of wonders in the span of a moment. At the end of a Richard Riccelli soliloquy, you will be left gasping, but you will have grasped a perfect metaphor, a unique and elegant way of uniting that universe full of wonders in a way you had never thought of before.

Richard Riccelli is our personal marketing god. He has been advising us since we began this business — not formally, but again and again with the perfect idea at the perfect moment. He is the reason that our logo looks the way it does — and why the dog in the logo smiles. He has been along for each of the three versions of our signs — along with many other marketing decisions, large and small. We don’t always do what he says to do, but we think very carefully about everything he says.

Which isn’t easy, given how many stunningly original ideas he can cram into a single sentence! In tonight’s call we agreed that custom real estate signs are essentially direct marketing, inherently testable — and Richard has no use for marketing that is Read more

August 2, 2006

Trulia maptivating . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jeff at Trulia.com ate my feed and set up what I needed to make my own map. You can customize many details. Note that while Trulia gives you a color palette to work from, you can plug in your own hexadecimal values for web-safe colors. Very, very slick…

BloodhoundRealty’s Historic Properties


Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

July 31, 2006

Feed the world . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Because I’m too stupid to sleep, I wrote software to parse my MLS feed into customized XML feeds for the real estate aggregators. I have Trulia.com done (because I want to play with their free maps API) and I have what I need to do Propsmart.com. Google Base, too.

What do I need?

More.

If you know of a real estate aggregator, hit me with a comment or an email, if you would. From where I am now, I’m maybe 15 minutes a feed to add new ones. Tower of Babel, but it is what it is. I’d be grateful if you could tell me who I’m missing.

Technorati Tags: ,

July 29, 2006

Catching up — for now . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I live in Safari, an exceptionally adept tabbed web browser. In consequence, I can pile up page after page of stuff, each crammed with semi-organized tabs, that I intend to deal with later. Well, fast is the new slow and later is now — at least for the moment.

How will the TruZillia APIs make money? Volume! Baron Briefs has a richer answer:

My initial thought on why each would do this: By opening up Zestimates and Zindices to the masses, Zillow is following in the foot steps of major players like Amazon and Google…build an API, let others innovate off the technology, and then acquire the best of breed. Remember, they recently picked up an extra $25 million to “broaden their product offering”. As far as TruliaMap, it’s likely an attempt to win over agents and brokers who haven’t warmed up to the idea of their website being crawled and scraped. Now, they get a cool widget for their website and Trulia gets access to more listings.

Galen Ward at Rain City Guide has more, including sightings of the Great Kong, the 900 pound gorilla that is Google. And: Will brokers embrace Trulia’s maps?:

In other news, Trulia is now letting you post their listings on your site. They say it’s for agents and brokers, but do agents and brokers really want to steer people away from their web sites? If a visitor clicks on More details… they are whisked to the listing agent’s website. I predict that it will mostly be used by bloggers and non-real estate people.

The Real Estate Newsblog takes exception, sotto voce, to to my criticisms of Zillow.com’s epistemology:

I guess a significant problem for Zillow at the moment is credibility. Some suggest that Zillow’s “Zestimates” are way off base, but since they’re still in beta, it’s probably slightly premature to be overly critical at this point, notwithstanding the near $60 million they’ve got in seed money.

In fact, for the reason I named, Zillow.com cannot ever produce a reliable evaluation of a house. This is not a matter of refinement, it’s a fundamental defect in the epistemological model they’re working from. Read more

July 28, 2006

Who should be shuddering . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…about Trulia.com casting their net of free map-mash-ups all over the place? How about Redfin.com? Unless they have another fish in their pocket, they are now head-to-head competitors with ZipRealty.com, HelpUSell.com, Assist2Sell.com, etc.

Bottom-feeders of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your investment capital!

Technorati Tags: , ,

July 28, 2006

TruZillow and the dis-form-ation of real estate web sites . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Color me grateful, but one benefit of the Trulia/Zillow free APIs for Realtor web sites is that we should see the end of the sleazy practice of making dewy-eyed anonymous-by-preference Google-borne immigrants fill out a form to search the MLS listings.

This crap is straight out of Dan Gooder, but, just as less is more, Gooder is worse. Acolytes of The Church of Seth know better. Interruption marketing (what Trulia and Zillow plan to do) is bad, but hostage-taking is insufferable.

It’s strictly a matter of serendipity that Seth Godin has the same first name as Cain and Abel’s other brother, but here is a Golden Rule more precious than gold itself: If the tables were turned, how would you want to be treated? If you — out of curiosity or because you want to invest in another town or because you want to move your widowed mother into a better neighborhood — visit another Realtor’s web site, do you want to surrender your personal details just to surf the local MLS? If not, then why would you do this to your own potential clients?

Luckily for the rest of us, we probably won’t have to wait for the Gooderites to discover a better morality. The TruZillow sites will be free — as Stewart Brand always wanted them to be — and the sites that continue to cower behind Berlin Wall-like contact-info forms will be neglected.

And — it just occurs to me — the Truliactive and Zillowized sites will probably be linked from Trulia.com and Zillow.com, which has SEO implications. And now I’m interested…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,

July 27, 2006

A map mash-up on steroids: Building the perfect beast . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The software specification shown hear harkens back to this weblog post in reaction to The Future of Real Estate Marketing‘s remarks on ShackYack.com, a particulary robust real estate seach tool using a Google Maps mash-up for its interface. Cathy and I designed this as a futher elaboration on the ShackYack.com model. Given that maps are now free (shudder!), there’s is no reason to hoard this design, and every good reason to throw it out to the world in the hopes that someone will implement these ideas.

PROBLEM: MLS search systems (at least ours) are inadequate. The programmers aim for easy-to-use interfaces with no SQL-like access to the data.

PROBLEM: End-user search systems (like IDX) are inadequate, too dumbed down and unsatisfying.

PROBLEM: Neither sort of search is comprehensive; only MLS listings are shown.

PROBLEM: Either sort of search leaves too many unanswered questions.

OPPORTUNITY: A search system like ShackYack.com is very satisfying, even if it is still inadequate and limited.

SOLUTION: Mash it all even more: A ShackYack-like interface to a high-octane search engine (extensible on the fly so as not to be too daunting) of both MLS and XML-fed or user-entered FSBO listings, with on-line shopping-like features, side-by-side comparison features, user selection and exclusion, and, finally Zillowish comping of the short list against active and sold listings — all of this still and always reflected on the ShackYack-like interface.

I. Search. Full SQL/RDBMS, reflected in the user-interface.

II. Database. Full local MLS plus any acquirable XML feeds of FSBOs, with a form for do-it-yourself one-off FSBOs. ShackYack is using shades of gray to reflect relative price, but it would make more sense to me to use separate colors and shades of those colors to reflect types and relationships of listings.

III. Search interface. Basic search always visible, with pop-outs to add or remove more robust types of search categories. If some MLS data is limited to members, as it is now, certain search categories would be available only to logged-in MLS members. The trouble with a ShackYack-like search is that too many pertinent criteria are missing. It’s fun to play with, but for a true home search, you’d be Read more

July 27, 2006

Color me stupid, but . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…I don’t get it.

The Future of Real Estate Marketing avers that Trulia.com’s release of its map interface is a shudder-inducing disaster for other developers. This on the heels of yesterday’s reporting on Zillow.com’s release of its API to individual brokerages. There’s more news on both announcements at RealtyThoughts.

Is this exciting news for Realtors? Possibly. Gee whiz technology is like CheezWhiz — a little goes a long way. There may actually be a qualified, motivated real estate buyer who says, “If only I could see all the properties on an interactive map.” If so, that person is only surrounded by eleven other qualified, motivated buyers saying, “If only there were more photos…”

That’s as may be, and this stuff will surely be deployed. If I were Trulia.com, I would hook into that Zillow.com back-end and disintermediate the behotches: All the usual Truila details-in-a-box plus the completely unreliable Zestimate. If Zillow won’t roll over, someone else will.

But this is my question: How the hell are either of these two quivering little firms going to make money on this? “Advertising!” they shout in unison, but the advertising is on their home pages, where these APIs aren’t. Each one has a little click-back button to take self-selected volunteers back to the home planet. But if I’m getting the milk for free at LargelyUnobjectionableAtlantaHomes.com, why the heck would I go to the dairy?

If anybody’s shuddering it could be because they’re getting the not-too-subtle idea that what the “2.0” in Web 2.0 means is that investors will be shooting themselves in both feet this time…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

July 26, 2006

The elemental aimlessness of MLS-lessness . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Citing an article from the Boston Globe, the Real Estate Investing For Real bog insists that:

There should be a system where anyone, real estate agents, FSBOs, etc., can list or search for properties.

Great news! Such a tool exists. It’s called the classified section of the newspaper. Not so cheap to list, but searching costs around half-a-buck. Even better, CraigsList.com is free in most markets.

The good news is, the writer already has what he wants — in vast abundance: CraigsList.com, Trulia.com, PropSmart.com, et infinitely cetera. The bad news is, the writer already has what he wants — vastly abundant free or nearly-free listing portals, each of which has its own data structure and feed format. The geniuses who are bringing us all this cleverly-designed white noise don’t actually understand the problems the MLS was created to solve: open listings and the difficulty of coordinating cooperation among agents from different brokerages. So what do we find on CraigsList.com, Trulia.com, PropSmart.com, et infinitely cetera? Open listings and no provision for coordinating cooperation among agents. O!, Brave New World, simultaneously disintermediated and reambiguated. It’s hard to regard this as an improvement.

What the writer really wants is something very much like the MLS, but without exclusive membership, without the mandatory unilateral offer of compensation and without the intellectual property rights of listing brokers. You could say he wants to eat his cake and still have it, but the sad part is, he just might get his wish. Even as loose as we are about internet businesses, I’m pretty sure the Feds would regard such a thing arising privately as collusion. But if the Feds ram it down our throats instead…

The cure for what the writer thinks ails us might be a lot worse than the disease.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

« Older posts Newer posts »

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

Media Contacts