That’s a lawyer question. You need to contact a lawyer when you have big issues after closing. Here “manufatured” homes are really mobile homes. I don’t have any experience with mobile homes. In some states they are “personal property” and not real estate and have the same laws as cars on resale.

Just about every other product you can buy today has online reviews. These reviews may be incorrect due to ignorance or outright malice, but that’s just how it is. Why should it be any different for homes?

I want to temper my enthusiasm because some people are questioning my motivation. So, take this with a grain of salt.

What Zillow just did REQUIRES homeowners and agents to “protect” their properties on Zillow. It ain’t necessarily fair but it is brilliant. Zillow, in one fell swoop, created a national MLS database by demanding that homeowners who care about their property WILL pay attention to the accuracy of the info on it.

I’m, obviously, excited to see where I can profit from this.

I’ve been unable to respond due to RCG’s server being down this morning.

You seem to be misunderstanding me. I never said I was against having a dialog between seller and buyer(s)…quite to the contrary, this is exactly what should be happening. Furthermore, the hard questions should also be asked and answered. Ultimately, both seller and buyer should enter into the home sale transaction fully informed as best they can be with as much objective, relevant and meaningful information as they can get (and hopefully, they might even find the process informative, useful and enjoyable).

As far as your statement, “I don’t want this process easy or sanitized”. I think consumers are best served with as easy a process as possible…complicated, cumbersome processes will drive customers away from Zillow, not encourage them to come back. As far as being “sanitized” is concerned, if Zillow doesn’t find some method to constantly monitor all these glorified “chat rooms”, it risks having them spiral out of control into what is effectively a “Jerry Springer Show” for home sales. I could make millions off suing idiot third-parties who get onto Zillow’s home sale “chat rooms”, saying all kinds of wild, stupid comments that damage home owners.

I think Zillow is a GREAT business that has the potential to help bring down the real estate cartell, and help open up a free home sale market. It’s been making great progress towards this; but again, I feel this Q & A “chat room” won’t work if every silly third-party can say virtually anything they want to.

Thanks for sharing – it’s awesome to hear that our site helped that buyer avoid a big mistake.

I agree. It’s not Zillow’s fault if a deal fell through. I just thought it was interesting how this deal fell through. The buyers agent never brought up any sold comps to justify the full price offer that was, I presume, eagerly accepted. From what I understood and I’m not privy to all the details, the buyer found out the information on their own via Zillow and initiated the events that I led to the deal falling apart—buyer learning that the home was essentially a flip with minimal improvements that the buyer thought was basically laughable. To me it appeared strange that a buyers agent didn’t discuss sold comps and selling history of the subject home with the buyer.

It is a “buyer beware” and up to the buyer to fully research the home they are purchasing.

I, however, think a dialogue will get closer to the truth than the monologue we have now.

I don’t care if things are neat and clean.

For the largest purchase or sale that many people will likely be making in their lives, I think most are unlike you.

They want to ask the hard questions.

They don’t mind sifting through the various information and weighing what to believe and what to discount.

Buyers don’t want the information they recieve sanitized to the sellers benefit.

If this is done properly, this will be a large step forward in trying to attain allusive transparancy for the consumer.

Make it messy. Give me all the info I can possibly absorb, let me sift through it, roll around in it, give each piece the sniff test, and make me as educated as I possibly can be on this purchase that could make or break my financial future as well as have eiter wonderful or devestating effects on my short and long-term quality of life.

I don’t want this process easy or sanitized. I want it to be dirty but informative to the point where I thoroughly understand all the good and, more importantly, all the bad that signing those 5 dozen pieces of paper is going to get me.

I agree with you that truly objective info is virtually impossible to find. However, it seems to me getting objective info is getting harder to find all the time…everything seems to be opinion-based reporting…neutral, objective reporting in which the listener/reader makes up their own mind is all but extinct (if it ever really existed…but that’s another issue).

I’m sorry to hear your had those problems with your house. Yes, perhaps a feature such as Zillow’s Q & A may have prevented that. However, I see too much opportunity for abuse (again, I’m an attorney, and maybe I’m jaded). For example, if I’m selling my house, the last thing I want is some idiot thinking he’ll get a lower price, and possibly scare away competing buyers, by fabricating a bunch of lies that I’m now going to have to defend.

Just as you stated, I too don’t believe anyone is likely to comment on someone else’s house unless they have a monetary incentive to do so. Thus, I fear Zillow’s new Q & A forum will not meaninfully further objective dialog…it seems like simply more unecessary “stuff” we’ll have to wade through to get to something close to the truth.