Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Month: October 2006 (page 7 of 7)
There’s a decently if not very deftly balanced comparison of Gilbert, Arizona, to Portland, Oregon, in the Christian Science Monitor today. The star of the piece is urbanologist Joel Kotkin, so Gilbert doesn’t suffer the usual big-city-dweller’s I-just-don’t-get-it sliming. The issue of fecundity is touched upon without any mention of the fact that Gilbert is fecundity made flesh — that cities like Gilbert are where U.S. population growth occurs. Portland’s New Urbanism is detailed, although neither Richard Florida nor the much lower fecundity rates — or even net population decline — associated with the New Urbanist movement are mentioned.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
How’s this for a synopsis of the best real estate movie ever made:
An idealistic architect battles corrupt business interests and his love for a married woman.
So little argue against, so much to dispute…
Nevermind. The Fountainhead is on Turner Classic Movies tomorrow night at 5 pm MST (YTZMV (your time-zone may vary)). That’s a poor time of day for watching TV, so you might wait for the DVD version, to be released November 7th.
Or just forget the whole movie, which is flawed by creepy performances and even creepier architecture, a huge betrayal of the Sullivan/Wright modernism the film intends to celebrate. Snag the book
Plus which, movie or book, how many works of art are so thoroughly about the real estate business?
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Lee Ovington, a real estate appraiser who works and blogs in Elgin, IL has successfully reverse-engineered Zillow.com’s Automated Valuation Method:
The above examples give us some indication of how Zillow arrives at its value estimates (or Zestimate). Quite simply, the Zestimate relies on a calculated relationship of assessed value to sale price. Zillow merely takes selected transactions and calculates the relationship between the Assessed Values and the Sales Prices. It then applies that ratio to the subject’s assessed value (plus or minus some adjustments) and “whala”, you have Zestimate!
The above examples show that even when Zillow has a large margin of error in its Zestimate of 10-15%, the Zestimate is still highly correlated with the Assessor’s Values. We can conclude from this analysis, that the Zestimate is a derivative of the Assessor’s Values. Zillow may be slightly modifying the data by some weighting or factor like time or distance. That “tweaking” of the data could be the “secret” part of its formula; but clearly, the Zestimate is based on the underlying Assessor’s Values as indicated by the high correlation coefficient.
This is not surprising, by itself. It’s how AVMs work, after all. But by deconstructing Zillow’s results, Ovington demonstrates how little sauce there is in the vaunted “secret sauce”…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
In last week’s Blog-off Greg addressed the importance of cleaning your house before listing it in no less than three of his posts: #43, #78 and #98. When you’re posting over 100 articles in one day you don’t have the luxury of putting a lot of thought into your posts, but keeping your house clean while it’s on the market shouldn’t require a lot of thought. This should be obvious to everyone… It should be obvious to those of us who make a living marketing homes, of course. But this isn’t a trade secret. This is a precept that every seller, represented or not, should take to heart.
So when I was showing a buying client houses this past weekend, I was surprised to see these comments in the Remarks field of the listing:
This house is priced right and just needs cleaned up.
The remarks go on to highlight the features of the house. And everything that was promised in the remarks was dead-on accurate! It’s a wonderful floor plan in my favorite Surprise community, priced $22,000 under the most recent sale of this same model in the same subdivision. The only discernible difference between the higher priced structure, which went under contract only two weeks after it was listed earlier this year, and the house we saw Friday, which has now been on market for six and a half months, is the higher priced house had “fresh paint,” and Friday’s house “needs cleaned up.”
I had warned my clients before we entered, and told them that the seller was paying, with a low list price, for someone else to clean the house. The house is vacant, so I expected dirty walls that need painting, a dirty perhaps pet-soiled carpet, maybe some nicks or dents in the sinks or on the dishwasher. I had expected the type of problems that maybe a down-on-his-luck seller couldn’t afford to invest in fixing. But the house is only five years old, and as I said, empty, so I had hoped for better.
Instead, we were faced with an empty home filled with trash. Nothing big, nothing that would Read more
…is up at YoChicago.
Don’t forget that BloodhoundBlog is hosting the Carnival next week. Hit us with your best shot…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
This is from a comment by Jeff Brown, responding to an earlier post. I’m only showing a snippet here, but Jeff’s ideas are worth apprehending in full and pondering at length.
Once and for all, the money paid for representing a buyer OR a seller is based upon only one factor: The ultimate value perceived by the client. Is the client better off being represented by you than not represented period? Is he better off with you vs. another agent?
Here’s the thing: The market will bear what it knows about. This is the purpose of marketing, to educate your own buyer.
So think of it this way:
I personally can sell about a house a week. More than that, and I can’t juggle all the eggs. But even assuming I have enough ready, willing and able buyers to sell a house a week, the effort involved for some transactions can exceed the time I can afford to spend on it. Because we don’t relate costs to compensation, sometimes we make good money, and sometimes we take it in the shorts. No other personal services/consultation business works this way — except for contingency-fee attorneys.
So: In ideal circumstances, I can sell a house a week at $250,000 each, on average, earning $7,500 each, on average, for a gross income of $375,000. Not bad. My marketing costs and other expenses are huge, and, practically speaking, some of those transactions were under-performing: Either the deal didn’t close at all or my costs exceeded my return. And, of course, I don’t always have a buyer to work with every week. Unused Realtor capacity is a hidden cost in this business, one that would be accounted for in the books for in any other business. But still, after everything: Nothing to sneeze at.
But suppose I can structure my business a different way. What if I were to charge a flat fee to represent a buyer in exchange for a non-refundable retainer. My marketing costs just plummeted, especially for the high-end clients whose homes we want to list — now and also when they move again. My exposure for under-performance just Read more
BlueRoof.com has a new map searching interface, combining a number of good ideas from other interfaces with the company’s great design sense.
The interface features the slider controls seen in ShackYack.com‘s search tool. Unlike that system, though, BlueRoof.com does not get bogged down trying to display more listings than its underlying software can handle. If your search results in too many results, you are invited to narrow it.
The search area is defined by the visible portion of the map, however, which implies that, if you don’t already know where you want to be, you can’t use a relatively unfocused search to seek out neighborhoods in your price range. We’re sweltering under heat maps just now, and that would be a simple solution here.
The BlueRoof.com interface uses three different kinds of house icons to indicate active listings: A green roof is MLS-listed, a blue roof is a FSBO, and a blue roof with an avatar out front is a FSBO with broker participation. This is an idea we had talked about when first we saw the ShackYack interface — adding to it ShackYack’s idea of using color intensity as a one-glance method of comparing relative prices.
Things I don’t like:
I want more search tools, even if they come in a pop-down tab to make things simple for the punters.
I want to be able to get a feel of the whole housing market, even if I can’t see houses without narrowing down by area.
I have a huge screen, but I still get a small map. I think the page is being built to conform to BlueRoof.com’s toolbar (which is gorgeous), rather than growing to the available screen real estate.
I could not get to the detail page on any house. (Mac OSX 10.4.7, Safari 2.0.4)
Overall: Very pretty. I think this is the new high bar for map search interfaces. Considering the money in play at the Goliath-like realty.bot sites, BlueRoof.com is David triumphant today…
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
I wrote this as a comment at Rain City Guide (which thread is very worth visiting), but I’m echoing it here:
> Who pays the commission is all semantics, really.
I would disagree with that. Buyers have been persistently misled about who pays the commissions, which skews their behavior.
> The buyer will not pay LESS for the house if there’s no buyers agent involved
Let’s put the buyer’s agent’s compensation under the buyer’s control and see what happens. A buyer who hires me to help execute a transaction he or she has already decided to undertake should pay less for my representation than a buyer commencing a completely unfocused home search. Do you disagree?
Ours is the only sort of business where compensation is completely uncoupled from effort and costs. That’s absurd, particularly as home prices surge upward. Doubly absurd when you consider that there is a glacial glut of real estate licensees.
> I don’t see the point for all the discussion here.
How about because the things most worth talking about are the ones no one ever wants to talk about? 😉
Technorati Tags: compensation for buyer representation, real estate, real estate marketing