Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Zillow.com (page 7 of 13)
Zillow blog. Advertise yourself as a lister in the neighborhoods you farm in a venue we know is strongly appealing to sellers. This is so smart it makes my brain ache…
Later: Adopted. Whole-heartedly and with alacrity. I need for you to be shopping for what I’m selling, or else my advertising dollars are wasted. But I need to be selling you what you are actually shopping for, or I am wasting your time. This idea beyond brilliant…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
BloodhoundBlog is celebrating its first birthday this coming Friday, so I wanted to take a little time to highlight some of the best work we’ve done over the last twelve months.
There is a limit to how much primary reporting a real estate weblog can do. The webloggers are each stuck in one spot, for one thing, plus we all have day jobs.
But if we choose to, we can do exemplary work at evaluating new product releases. We’re end-users of the products we report on, so we already know what we like, what we don’t like, and what we wish were different. In our own particular case, BloodhoundBlog contributors like Brian Brady tend to go over new products in exhaustive detail, wringing out every conceivable facet and implication. We’re eager to know what the vendor thinks we’ll find in a new tool, but we’re even more avid to unearth the capabilities their software engineers had not foreseen.
So: Watch us work. Here are some of the breaking news posts we have generated over the last year:
- Version 3 of Zillow.com’s software
- 2006 is the Year of Zillow: The 900 pound AVM has been upgraded to be a free listing platform and the presumptive national MLS system…
- Is Bloodhoundblog The Most Wired In Blog In Real Estate?
- Early morning Zillow news round-up…
- Zillow redux: A post-diluvian retrospective…
- Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution
- In the trenches with Zillow.com: A working Realtor’s first-hand experience listing a home…
- Zillow.com versus Realtor.com: Nothing grows in the shade of great tree…
- Thank You, Mr. Barton, May I Have Another?
- Redfin.com comes to California
- Podcast with Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman: “We’re looking for nerds living in nice houses”
- Glenn Kelman on Redfin.com’s move into Southern California: “I’ve never had to think so hard in an interview in my life”
- What if Redfin gave a PR offensive and nobody came?
- Redfin.com’s CEO Glenn Kelman: “What if the parasites had to eat the parasites?”
- Version 5 of Zillow.com’s software
- Planet Zillow.com: Burgeoning Realty.bot grows, potentially, to become a self-sustaining residential real estate eco-system
- A screen-shot tour of Zillow.com’s new feature set
- Podcast with David Gibbons, Zillow.com’s Director of Community Relations: “We are throwing the gates wide open to the Read more
This is me in the Arizona Republic (permanent link).
State rethinks crackdown on online home appraisals
The move by the Arizona Board of Appraisal and Attorney General Terry Goddard to prosecute Zillow.com, and potentially other Internet-based home valuation services, may be at an end.
Last June and November, the board ordered Zillow to cease and desist offering its free “Zestimates” in Arizona. The Attorney General’s Office followed up with a letter of its own, threatening prosecution. No other Automated Valuation Model was targeted.
Arizona Senate Bill 1291 was drafted earlier this year to fortify the board’s argument, redefining “appraisal” to mean any opinion of value, not just a paid evaluation contracted from a professional appraiser.
Rep. Michelle Reagan initiated the process of amending the legislation to permit AVMs to operate in Arizona. Her amended version passed the House and was subsequently further amended in a joint House-Senate conference committee.
The Senate voted Monday night to approve the amended version of SB 1291. Among the amendments was an exemption for free Web-based AVMs from regulation under the state’s appraiser licensing laws. The House approved the amended language Tuesday.
As the Web site LittlePinkHouses.com notes, the amendments also undid other changes that had been sought in the bill. The composition of the Board of Appraisal will not be changed to include a majority of professional appraisers and the legal definition of an appraisal will conform to a common-sense understanding of the term.
As originally drafted, the bill would have outlawed virtually any estimation of value, possibly even including the casual conversations of neighbors. This is the amended definition of an appraisal:
“A person who produces a statement that is provided to any other person concerning the estimated value of real property through an Internet Website, automated valuation or other software program or other means of comparative market analysis and who discloses that the estimate is not an appraisal.”
This language absolves not just Zillow but also real estate licensees producing Broker Price Opinions for lenders and, presumably, other methods of evaluating homes.
The amended bill awaits only the signature of Gov. Janet Napalitano to become law.
< ?PHP include("Zapraisails.php"); ?>
From Worse Than Failure, a coder’s redoubt:
Donniel Thomas writes “Javascript isn’t for the weak of heart or those short of patience. What works in one browser may not function properly, or result in a nasty JS error in another (*cough*IE*cough). Which is why I can understand what this programmer meant.”
The following screenshot is from the homepage of Zillow.com, which is one of the most popular and AJAX-y Real-Estate sites on the web. And, as of this writing, the coder’s plea still remains …
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
To all appearances, the attempt to criminalize Zillow.com’s Zestimations of Arizona real property will be all over when the fat lady signs. Not sings, signs. Arizona Senate Bill 1291, as amended to suffer Automated Valuation Models gladly, passed it’s final reading tonight. The amended bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 28-2. All that remains to be done is for Governor Janet Napalitano to sign the bill into law and things can… continue pretty much as they have all along.
Of late it seemed the legislature might recess without taking up the Zillow amendment, potentially exposing Attorney General Terry Goddard to the embarrassment of having to enforce his own and the Board of Appraisal’s idiotic interpretation of standing law. For all that I’m glad to see better sense prevail, that spectacle would have been amusing to watch.
In any case, assuming Napalitano doesn’t find some previously-unsuspected third foot to shoot herself in, this silly little drama should be over shortly.
Further notice: My details are a little off here, but Cathy Jager at Little Pink Houses has the straight dope.
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Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
From Jeff Somers at Zillow Blog:
Soon, we will be launching the capability for brokers to automatically upload their active listings for free to Zillow, reaching the more than 4 million people who come to the site every month — more than half of whom are in the market to buy or sell.
Even when we first launched the ability for listing agents and brokers to add their listings for free to Zillow last December, we knew we wanted to find ways to make the process even easier. We have talked with numerous agents and brokers around the country — and we have heard over and over that you want to send us listings through a direct broker feed. As I type, our developers are wrapping up work on a very simple tool that will allow brokers to automatically upload listings to the site and keep those listings up to date.
There is a form you can fill out to be notified when the feature becomes available.
Two days ago Zillow announced a similar sort of sign-up form for lenders. What might this mean? At the time, I held my tongue, since what I have to say is pure speculation. But with today’s news as hook, here are a couple of wild-eyed conjectures:
My guess is that they’re going to provide some kind of EZ lender hook-up for buyers and re-fi candidates. Perhaps LOs would have to assert interest in up to five zip codes or something like that. Zillow likes person-to-person contact, rather than engaging a nationwide vendor like Countrywide. If the presumption is that they’re looking for a comprehensively satisfying experience like Wikipedia or Ebay — and this is the presumption I work from when thinking about Zillow — then they’re going to want to facilitate relationships to be carried out on Zillow through time, rather than just throw off leads.
It is possible, using tax records and loan rates, to calculate profitable re-fi candidates: Homes that can be refinanced at a net savings, month-to-month, to the owner. Zillow has everything it needs to do this, and 70 million candidate homes to work from. This Read more
Well.
It is beyond all doubt that readers here are thrilled to the core to cogitate on the implications of real estate licensing laws and their hypothetical repeal. So far the silence has been deafening, with nothing but a host of fallacious arguments, some charming insults and something new under the sun: green-baiting. (It’s like red-baiting, but for Capitalists.) What we have not had is a rational defense of the law.
That’s a real shame, because we are on the verge, potentially, of a revolution in real estate brokerage. Take note:
By means of its “Make Me Move” feature, Zillow.com is engaged in the essential act of real estate brokerage, the introduction of buyer to seller. Zillow’s efforts are not subject to state regulation because it is not performing brokerage for compensation.
IggysHouse.com is going to list homes for sale for free. The state may try to regulate IggysHouse, perhaps by arguing that the co-broke is compensation, even if IggysHouse keeps none of it.
Either way, the stench from Tennessee is too thick to ignore. What are traditional real estate brokers going to try to do with state laws when they come up against competition willing to work for free?
And: Does anyone want to argue that the proposals the traditional brokers come up with will be good for the consumer?
Why has no one been able to rebut the argument that real estate licensing laws are contrary to the consumer’s interests? How about because the argument is correct?
But: I’m here to help. The laws themselves are not going anywhere. Rotarian Socialism rules the country, and it will for quite a while. But you can know what is right and what is wrong, and you can apply your mind to figuring out who is to be benefitted and who penalized when new laws are proposed — as they will be.
Give a look to these questions. If you answer them honestly, you will understand why the real estate licensing laws should be repealed — even though they won’t be.
Like this:
In the absence of real estate licensing laws, are consumers more likely or less likely to investigate the education, qualifications Read more
At today’s World Wide Developer Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the availability of a public beta version of Safari 3 for both the Macintosh and Windows. Apple’s goal is to increase Safari’s already-respectable market share, probably to induce more Windows users to switch to the Macintosh.
Importantly, Safari 3 successfully runs Zillow.com’s main web site, as well as the MarketLinx/Tempo MLS system. These were two of the more notable sites that failed to work properly with past versions of Safari. The inability to run the MLS system in Safari had stymied our own plans at BloodhoundRealty.com to completely jettison Windows and the kludgey hardware it runs on.
This is our house on Zillow.com. The Zestimate is off by $123,397 or so, but the site is running flawlessly in Safari, where it has never run before.
There’s more. Last week, Jobs said that the operating system on the iPhone will be a full version of Mac OS X. Today at the WWDC, he said that the iPhone will be running a full version of Safari.
The implication? As I discussed when the iPhone was introduced, with MLS access, this will be the best Realtor phone ever.
Guess what? This is looking like the best Realtor phone ever…
I’ve found all kinds of cool upgrades in the Safari 3 beta just in the course of writing this post. Download it and play with it yourself. Not only did your Windows machine just drop off the edge of the universe, your laptop, whether Windows or Mac, may have gone with it.
Further notice: Richard Riccelli points out that pre-release software always entails a risk. If you can’t get yourself out of trouble, better not to get in. On the other hand, Saft has been updated to work with the beta. And while the Windows wizards have been trying to knock Safari down, over 1,000,000 people have downloaded the WinSafarai beta.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
From the Zillow Blog:
One request we received over and over again (including impassioned pleas from our own president, Lloyd Frink) was to let people see a list of Home Q&A in their city or ZIP code. Agents and other real estate professionals want to see what questions are being asked in their area and to help answer those questions. Homeowners want to see what people are saying about homes in their specific neighborhood.
Well, as of Tuesday night, your requests have been answered. On the Zillow home page, just below the two sample Home Q&A’s, is a new link that says “See Home Q&A in your area.” Click on it, and you’ll be taken to a page where you can type in any city and state or ZIP code and see the most recent questions and answers being asked about homes in that area.
This is an important catch-up to Trulia.com’s recent upgrades.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
This is from mail from Thomas Johnson of ERA Houston, which, among other things, coins the terms “Zestifarm” and “Zestifarming” for the various ways one can pee on the tree in Zillow:
I love the marking your farm analogy. I walk my dog, Sophie, every evening and I have noticed that she marks everything that is of higher than average height: a clump of grass, a twig, a lump of Spanish moss, whatever. I liken that to canine text messaging a quick sniff, squirt and move on. When we get to the mailboxes, it is different. That is much more interesting. There is lots of sniffing and squirting. I guess we could call that pee mail. My takeaway is that there are so many little repetitions that we can use to mark our Zestifarms. And, the price is right.
Less like pee mail, more like Twitter. Even so, I just quoted that part to make the girls squeal. But: Nothing focuses the mind like an apposite metaphor. One theory says that dogs mark their territory so they can find their way home if they get lost. Hence the poor, lost Rain Dogs.
Dog owners know better: Dogs mark to cover the scent left by other dogs. To have your pee peed on is to become an unpuppy:
I spent the night tossing and turning thinking about “marking my farm”. I think that an agent could take over the cyber neighborhood before the entrenched legacy agent/broker even knew what was happening. A while ago, I bought a cheap little program called “watermark it”. It enables you to digitally watermark photos. I bought it to protect my MLS photos, but it was banned by policy. My 4 AM revelation was to watermark my Zestifarm photos with a small web address. It would not hyperlink, but “Kilroy was here”.
This is something that I’ve been thinking about, but I hadn’t done anything about it until I got this mail. As I mentioned before, there is an even better “pee on the tree strategy” than listing homes for sale:
Instead of announcing homes for sale, walk the neighborhoods you farm, taking Read more
The attempted shakedown of Zillow.com that began last October — when The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaining that the nascent Seattle-based Automated Valuation Model (AVM) was misleading minority homeowners about the value of their homes — has come to stunningly banal conclusion.
In a letter dated May 4, 2007, the FTC elects to take “no further Commission action,” citing Zillow.com’s fortified disclaimers about the accuracy of AVM results and the need for site visitors to investiagte other sources of real estate evaluation.
The NCRC has since discovered the sub-prime mortgage melt-down as a more profitable mine to be quarried, since lenders can be faulted simultaneously for the foolish loans they made to minority borrowers in the past and for forbearing to be equally foolish in the present.
You can read the FTC’s letter here.
I wrote a great deal about this issue last fall, all of which is linked below. As with the State of Arizona’s persecution of Zillow.com, I see the NCRC shake-down as old-school criminality attempting to impose itself on the internet — trying to leverage off of Zillow’s fame or perhaps viewing AVMs as the weakest member of the new-economy herd in PR terms. In any case, this moral victory with the FTC will rob innuendo-wending reporters of a minor weapon to inveigh against the web start-up in stories about the on-going Arizona controversy.
These are my posts about the attempted NCRC shake-down of Zillow.com:
- Welcome to Race Piracy 2.0: Zillow.com is targetted for the crime of having deep pockets…
- Zillow.com shake-down: This is the first shoe dropping…
- Zillow.com shake-down: Creeping disclaimerism as a subject-changing gambit…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: How the other shoe will drop…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: BloodhoundBlog’s take so far — and a chance to win a BloodhoundRealty.com Tee Shirt…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: Preparing for the denouement…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: The piling on begins — and Spencer Tracy is nowhere to be found…
- Defending Zillow.com…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: At last a discouraging word about NCRC…
- Avid AVM aversion extends only to Zillow.com: NCRC off-shoot starts competing on-line valuation service…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: Deconstructing the NCRC complaint…
This is from the Tucson Daily Citizen:
Zillow.com offers online estimates of home values. There is now plenty of public data available for computers to crunch to make the estimates pretty good.
According to Zillow’s Web site, in the Phoenix metro area its estimates are within 6 percent of the actual selling price 50 percent of the time, and 72 percent of the time they are within 10 percent.
Although Zillow states on its Web site that its estimates aren’t appraisals, the state Board of Appraisal has ordered it to stop offering them in Arizona.
Here’s a better idea: How about abolishing the state Board of Appraisal? Any property is actually worth whatever a willing buyer is willing to pay to a willing seller.
Lenders might want appraisers in whom they have confidence to ensure that the property will cover their principal in the event of default. However, lenders are big boys. They can set up their own certification process to obtain the expertise they want. There’s no need for government to do it for them.
I find this logic unassailable. But it does make me yearn to live in a town with a newspaper…
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Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Arizona State Senate Bill 1291, as amended to assure the legality of consumer-oriented Automated Valuation Models such as that used by Zillow.com, passed the Arizona House today by a vote of 52-3, with five members not voting. The bill will be transmitted back to the Arizona Senate for reconsideration there.
The amendments, proposed last Monday by Scottsdale Republican Representative Michele Reagan, include language that will exempt AVMs from appraisal licensing requirements with the stipulation that home valuations are provided at no cost and are not called “appraisals.”
The Arizona Board of Appraisal had issued two cease and desist letters to Zillow.com — but to no other free AVMs — demanding that the Seattle-based internet real estate start-up stop issuing home valuations in Arizona until it obtained an Arizona appraisal license. The Attorney General of Arizona had issued a similar letter to Zillow.com.
If the amended version of SB 1291 passes the Senate and is signed by the governor, free consumer-oriented AVMs will be able to operate without impediments in Arizona.
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Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, clued me in to an email he got yesterday, which I was supposed to get as well. Mine didn’t come because the email address was wrong. Jay deals with the substance of the email in the post linked above, but here’s the meat of the matter:
Why are Jay and I, and other principled Realtors, rising to Zillow.com’s defense in response to the attempts at persecution of the net-based real-estate start-up by the Arizona Board of Appraisal?
I speak only for myself, but I can always speak at length about the positions I take. First, it’s important to understand what this is not about, in my opinion:
- It’s not about Zillow.com.
- It’s not about real estate.
- It’s not about appraisals.
- It’s not about job-protection, although this seems to me to be the objective behind the persecution.
- It’s not even about Arizona.
I think what is really going on here is the first campaign in a long war to determine whether internet-based commerce will be suffered to grow as it has until now, without restrictions or impediments. Or: Whether the combined forces of power-mad “statesmen,” progress-hating “progressives” and hand-out-hungry “businesses” will be able to break the net to the saddle they have strapped onto every other enterprise in America.
In a sense, I’m not defending Zillow.com’s business, I’m defending my own. I’m about principle before everything, so that doesn’t matter to me, although I do admire the necessary integrity of rectitude: The moral is the practical. But this is so much larger than Zillow that the instant matter blends into the background.
Many of the pioneers of internet technology are hard-line Capitalists, stout defenders of the idea of free enterprise. That’s not universal, but there is also a very strong gut-level libertarianism among entrepreneurs generally.
In fact, the internet has grown so quickly, and so unpredictably, that the reactionary forces determined to tax, regulate or forbid everything have been stymied. A few very far-sighted people have successfully argued against regulating the net, and, meanwhile, the would-be arbiters-of-everything have been held in check by their own monolithic ignorance of technology. People who see the net as Read more