…is up at The Future of Real Estate Marketing.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Month: July 2006 (page 1 of 6)
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: real estate, real estate marketing
I wrote this earlier today as a response to a comment, but I think it warrants a post of its own.
Here’s the Cliff’s Notes: After a huge run-up in home values, so far the Phoenix-area residential resale real estate market has given back four percent from the peak in December of 2005. We have a surfeit of inventory, but I suspect that many sellers are loosely-motivated. We have a completely normal number of buyers buying a completely normal number of homes in a completely normal number of days on market at a completely normal level of discounting on price. The idiot newspapers cannot stop comparing current conditions to the middle of the boom, but if the current market is compared to 2003, it becomes clear that, except for the surplus inventory, we are in a relatively normal market.
Whatever might happen in the future in the Phoenix real estate market, it is clear that, after more than two years’ worth of predictions of imminent doom, our oft foretold Armageddon has not yet come to pass. These facts are documented here. The blockquoted matter is snipped from the remarks of my interlocutor.
What makes you so certain that the majority of individuals who are re-selling at the moment are “loosely motivated” as you say?
First-hand experience and peering into the MLS. The surge in inventory started about September of 2005, and, from the beginning, I had the strong impression that many of the sellers were owner-occupants looking to cash out at the top of the market. When I show, I see a lot of homes that are not market-ready. A significant number of homes aren’t even available to be shown.
It seems that this housing run-up has featured a lot of speculation from “flippers” who bought as an investment and plan on selling for a profit.
I do not have this impression. Certainly most of the homes I’m showing (and most of those I represent) are owner-occupied. I have investors with homes for sale right now, but none at fire-sale prices. To the contrary, my investors are doing very well.
For what it’s worth, most mainstream media reports Read more
Glen Creno of the Arizona Republic catches sight of The Mole:
That’s especially true these days in metropolitan Phoenix’s post-boom housing market, where nearly everything has reversed since last year’s frenzy. The number of homes for sale on the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service increased nearly four times from June 2005 to last month, when it hit a level nearly double what experts consider healthy. Last year, homes sold in about three weeks. Now, it’s about triple that.
Some of the post-boom market figures are closer to historic Valley norms, but many homeowners had their assumptions of what a house is worth and how quickly it should sell recalibrated by the buying craze.
If you can get your mind past the sad fact that the Republic has never heard of a year before last year, it’s actually a fun article about the added value Realtors can bring to their clients.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
That sounds like a late-night TV pitch, but it’s actually possible in residential real estate. Housing is distinct from other investment vehicles in important respects. Unlike securities, real estate is a hard asset with an enduring intrinsic value. There are huge tax benefits accruing from owning real property, either as an owner-occupant or an investor. Most significantly, real estate can be leveraged up to 100% of its value.
Yes, you can buy a home with “nothing down.” Through the masquerade of a seller concession, you can even roll the closing costs into the loan, so that you can take possession of a rental property with absolutely no money out of pocket.
Why would you want to do this? Because the purpose of investing your money in real estate is not to own it but to profit from it. Real estate investment books are filled with bad ideas — never buy a cash-flow negative property, buy the cheapest home you can find, buy four-plexes in challenged neighborhoods, pay ahead on your mortgage to increase your equity. These are all terrible ideas because your sole objective should be cash-on-cash return: How much money did you take out of your pocket at the start of the investment, and how much money did you put back into your pocket at the end.
Is a cash-flow positive property a bad thing? No, but a home that is cash-flow negative — if you can afford the negatives out of other sources of income — can be a much better cash-on-cash investment.
Buying cheap is usually a terrible idea. The money from real estate investing comes from appreciation, not rents. Unless you convert the property to a higher and better use, what starts cheap usually stays cheap.
In the same way, buying multi-family properties or other homes in bad neighborhoods is unlikely to be a winning strategy. Your ratio of rents to costs may be better, but your appreciation will almost certainly be worse than buying in a more-avidly-desired neighborhood.
And paying ahead on your mortgage is just dumb no matter where you buy. With a 100% leveraged property, every penny of appreciation is Read more
The BubbleBrains swooped in en masse today, having only just now discovered my 21 reasons to bank on the Phoenix real estate market. Courage, confidence and competence are often found together in a solitary soul, but cowardice, cowering and impotence — these are the attributes of character of men who run in packs. I am more than libertarian enough to let them go to hell in their own way, but it seems only common courtesy to point the way. So I sent them hither and thither — blithering Bubbleheads lathered up into a dither. Now that’s just good, clean fun.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
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
Catherine Reagor of the Arizona Republic actually acknowledges that comparing this year to last year may not be an ideally-informative strategy:
Although the Valley’s housing market is definitely slowing, comparisons to last year’s frenzied sales pace and appreciation gains aren’t a perfect indicator. During 2005, metro Phoenix home prices soared 50 percent and houses were selling within days.
We call this tactic The Mole, in honor of Dr. Evil (who now runs a BubbleBlog from which he hopes to extract milllllllions of dollars). The alleged news is that new-build permits are down from last year. Big surprise. The actual news is that 29,943 have been pulled in the Valley through the end of June, which would have been a record-setting pace were it not for last year. Irresponsible reporting? You bet. Alas, we have no other kind in Phoenix.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
As with realPING, we’re pinching the best ninety percent of SureClose, too:
SureClose delivers every listing, sale, closing and/or loan file — and every document — online and on CD-ROM at closing. Your staff simply faxes or scans your files & documents to your secure, branded SureClose? web site. Files are then available 24/7 for review and management enterprise-wide.
Not faxing, scanning and uploading with a form, but the rest of it: Every doc on-line in a secure web site available to principals, their vendors and the brokerage, all ready to be dumped to a CD-ROM at the end of the transaction. Bullet-proof access to all documents for our clients and bullet-proof uploading and maintenance for the Realtor, all through the power of PHP.
Can’t beat the price — and the funny part is that our really good programmer is off having a teenager’s summer…
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
…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: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
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: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, disintermediation, real estate disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Catherine Reagor in the Arizona Republic runs down all the bad news, but there is a better lens for interpreting this information. Take note of M. Anthony Carr in Realty Times:
Buyers scurry, afraid of buying at the height of the market.
So why aren’t builders running scared? Because the underlying principles of a good market remain sound in the midst of the market fears. While nationally, the industry has cooled to “more sustainable levels,” according to the National Association of Home Builders, “The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports strong job gains in many of the fastest-growing states, with 37 states exceeding their pre-recession peak levels of employment in 2005.”
The group recently released a mid-year housing report on its real estate trends website, HousingEconomics.com. A cooling of the market this year will still result in the third highest level of housing starts in the last few years.
That’s why you keep seeing building projects going up. Definitely, not as many houses are being constructed in 2006 as last year, but the NAHB report points to several positive market growth indicators in various regions across the country.
Job growth is continuing upward. Unemployment is dropping. Businesses continue to expand and economists across the country continue to estimate that the need for more housing will stretch beyond the current inventory surplus.
The National Association of Realtors still is holding to 2006 being another very strong year — the third highest on record. NAHB members are still bull on the housing market. What we’re seeing in ’06, it seems, is a transition year. For buyers who have no choice but to buy because of social or lifestyle reasons (birth of new baby, marriage, retirement, in-laws moving in, new job, relocation, etc.) they will buy now and unwittingly pick up a great deal.
For buyers who are too skittish about the market, they will miss a financial boosting opportunity. In markets where it has normalized (D.C., Miami, Chicago, Phoenix) buyers who buy based on rock-hard solid economic evidence, will be excited in a few years that they bought a house low and now stand to earn a handsome profit a few Read more
…but don’t let’s lose sight of the important things: The Main Event of The World Series of Poker starts today.