“Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match”…I think matching clients to agents is great Galen!

People need to be a good fit to work together effectively, and it should result in a more positive experience for the comsumer.

LOL…I’m AMAZED!!! I LOVE Steph! Lucky guy! Yeah for the internet!

If we are successful, great agents will have more business and, as a whole, will spend more time working with clients and less time marketing. Mediocre and bad agents will have less business. I think that is very consumer friendly.

There are a lot of consumers who have horror stories about working with bad agents. If we can create a place where those people can find great agents, we’ll be providing a great service.

First of all, Estately costs the consumer nothing. The consumer also gets to use a state of the art home search tool (ad & pressure free I might ad) while they begin their home search.

OK, it costs their agent some financial flexability for transaction costs and cost the consumer a little bit of personal information if they want to get matched to an agent, but they need to know something about you in order to find a good match. When I looked at the Agent Match feature, it appeared the information they were gathering was just the essentials. If you don’t want to give out personal information, use Google or the phone book and start cold calling agents…

Furthermore, web sites don’t build themselves (I wish they did, because things would be a whole lot easier). Galen & company deserve to get compensated for the hard work they’ve put into building their site. If they want to monetize their efforts by selling referrals, instead of selling ads (Trulia / Zillow), homes (John L Scott / RedFin), or web sites (RealTech / me), that’s their perogative.

Besides, I met my wife over the internet, who am I to argue with it…

As to “another Redfin in the making” lets all rise up and say “bring em on!”.

As easy as it may be for you and I to find a good agent, more and more agents are simply throwing darts up when placing referrals.

So IF Galen puts the hard work into it that he has been, then:

1) The consumer benefits by getting some REAL assistance with finding a good agent that suits their particular needs.

2) The fee for that valued service is a fair rate.

3) Since all consumers negotiate the commission with their agent, buyers too, then the lower referral leaves some room for the consumer to negotiate further.

With a 25% – 35% referral fee, the lead generator has sucked out any possibility for the consumer to negotiate the commission. The lead generator sucked out their leverage in the transaction as well. With a 35% referral fee, the agent is less likely to chip in for that washer and dryer or dry rot repair.

Follow the chain of events down to close of escrow, and every too high referral fee will have negatively impacted the consumer.

I have to go put my spackle on for the Inman TV thing…but I’ll check back later.

The highest referral fees are paid via Corporate contracts when Real Estate firms pay the company of the relocated employee. That is a pretty standard 35% for the employee buying a property in the new location, and often a 50% referral fee on the house they sell where they are coming from. That hasn’t changed much in 15-20 years. It
is time for it to change IMNSHO.

A small portion of that is paid to the go between division, and not all to the consumers’ source of employment. Used to be 30% of the 35% went to the consumers’ place of employment. But that was 8-10 years ago.

The relocated employees are all too often negatively impacted by these referral fees. Someone get Bill Gates on the phone Lets knock them down to size so the employees can get best service, best agents and maybe some real leverage in the real estate transaction to boot.

1) If you take it, can you give me the rare and out of print ShackPrices coffee mug?

2) I’m not surprised that they dropped they Shack Prices name, although I’m very impressed they came up with such a great replacement name to build a brand around.

3) I wasn’t really sure how it worked. All I know is HouseValue’s business model and value proposition appears to be broken and I hope Galen & Doug will avoid repeating their Kirkland competitor’s biggest mistakes.

4) & 5) I was shocked to hear referral fees are so high (in addition to the fact that the quality of those referrals is often tims so poor). Given this back drop, the RE referral industry appears to have worse reputation than others in other referral industry segments (LendingTree, AutosByTel, ServiceMagic, etc)….

I’m hopeful Galen and Doug, will run their company with the integrity, cost consciousness, and passion that will make their referral based business model one that will serve it’s paying customers (agents) better than the industry players have to date.

Best of luck guys, I hope you can give “lead generation sites” a good name!

We are indeed hyper-focussed on matching people with great agents. There are a lot of mediocre agents out there and our clients deserve better.

We work through the traditional referral fee network: we refer clients to trusted great agents. Typically when an agent refers a client to another agent, they receive a 20% referral fee. Typically when a big named site sells your personal information to a real estate agent, they receive hundreds of dollars whether you are real or not, or they charge a 30-40% referral fee. They end up partnering with a lot of brand new and so-so agents. We can partner with great agents.

Ardell (and others) definitely swayed us on the name change. Some find shacks hip, but many, especially those who live in them, don’t want their home called a shack. We really like Estately and we never want to change names again.

As for the switch over, it took a day, and then a week of catching shack bugs as we continued to develop the site.