Category Archives: News

Mortgage and loan related entries

In good company…

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Over the past two years, the team over at Inman has done a particularly good job reaching out to the real estate blogging community (RE.net for short), and their latest article listing the top 25 most influential real estate bloggers was not only a great outreach tool, but particularly flattering of the Rain City Guide team.

If I had to hazard a guess as to why RCG was so well represented, two ideas come to mind… One is the good fortune we’ve had to bring on a group of engaging (and downright fun!) contributors and two, we’ve had awesome source material with interesting start-ups and a great local blogging community that goes beyond RCG contributors. Inman recognized as much by not only including Ardell and myself in the list, but also including a slew of Seattle bloggers including Marlow Harris, John Cook, David Gibbons and Glenn Kelman. All great people who have engaged and improved the RCG community over the past two and half years!

UPDATE:
Don’t miss:

What's in the best interests of agents?

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Jan at the logical dog has set up a petition that requests the NWMLS board to reverse it’s decision and continue sending listings to Realtor.com.

This got me thinking about the often-interesting dynamic between the “best interests” of brokers vs the “best interest” of agents, which is something I’ve heard Russ Cofano talk to quite eloquently. However, I really don’t have a feel for how agents feel about this issue. Is the decision to stop sending listings scene as something that was “thrust” upon agents, or is it something they advocated for? Because of the NWMLS unusual status of a “broker-owned” MLS, I’m assuming the former, but I’ve been wrong before so I’d be interested in hearing from agents in the audience…

Is it bad if everyone else does it too? What if you're one of the best?

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Realtors are the subject of another balanced-but-critical New York Times article today. This time it’s for a whole host of lobbying-related fair market-blocking activities.

Frankly, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for banks, but the strong-arm tactics of the National Association of Realtors described in the article make banks look like victims of injustice. The story meanders away from bank-blocking tactics to easier to explain subjects, like the federal suit brought against the National Association of Realtors for locking low-cost realtors out of many listings. It appears the government (a very pro-business administration, at that) wants to create a level playing field:

When the suit was filed, J. Bruce McDonald, a deputy assistant attorney general, said, “Our job is to ensure that one group of competitors doesn’t tell some of its members they can’t compete in a certain way and undercut the level playing field.”

The defense:

Ms. Janik warns that major changes to the multiple listing services could cause large nationwide brokerages to pull out of the system and establish their own private listings. That, she said, would be a far greater threat to small firms.

So what’s the story? As I understand it, the progressive (egads!) North West MLS does not allow brokers to selectively block listings from competitors sites, which is what the realtors say they have a right to do. And, as far as I can tell, Windermere and the other monsters still list their houses with the NWMLS. Why? Because listing on the MLS allows way more potential buyers to see their houses and, sorry FSBO lovers and separate MLS creators, having more potential buyers increases the speed and price at which your home sells. Also, it would be extraordinarily two-faced if they first said “don’t do For Sale By Owner (FSBO) because you won’t get the exposure that you would get with a full-service brokerage” and then said “list with us even though only we’re going to intentionally reduce the visibility of your property to only buyers who talk to our agents.”

If anything, the Justice Department’s suit should keep realtors in business longer. If the system is open just enough that innovators and alternative pricing models will use it, they keep people in the fold and maintain some pricing power. If the system is locked down, innovators will tend to create MLS replacements systems until one of them succeeds.

Realtors: a PR campaign is in order. Your organization is blocking open markets left and right in order to enforce a 5-6% commission structure. The reputation of the National Association of Realtors is headed toward car salesman and lobbyist territory and when other folks find themselves having monopoly-like pricing power, they spend some of that money on goodwill (see: Microsoft). When other organizations find themselves in this making lots of money, not very popular pickle (for good reasons or bad), they also advertise on NPR (see: ADM, Exxon, Walmart).

On a side note, why haven’t I heard of the sell-your-home-get-a-Toyota model?

“Because the industry functions as a cartel, it is able to overcharge consumers tens of billions of dollars a year,” said Stephen Brobeck, the federation’s executive director. “Consumers are increasingly wondering why they are often charged more to sell a home than to purchase a new car.”

-Galen
ShackPrices.com

John Cook Interviews Redfin CEO: Redfin is "crazy-good"

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Dustin pointed out that John Cook over at the Seattle PI just published an interesting interview of Redfin’s CEO, Glenn Kelman (Direct link to the mp3).

Before I jump in, I should point out that I run ShackPrices.com, a site that is faintly a Redfin competitor. That said, that both Redfin and ShackPrices are much more worried about our customers and competitors with lots of money than we are about each other. I’ll try my best to stay unbiased.

Up to this point, Dustin has been under the impression that Redfin is very insular (He’s even gone so far as to say “arrogant”). I get the impression that Redfin has some interesting technologies, but they are still looking for their path; Glenn is doing a big marketing push on a site that has only had cosmetic changes (to real estate buyers) in the last year. Throughout the interview he raves about his site. I think he says exciting ten times and “crazy-happy” or “crazy-love” at least three times. If you check Redfin.com, their news bar clearly shows that they’re on a marketing push (it also shows they still don’t have an interface person who can tell them to use that valuable space more effectively).

Glenn then talks about how addictive (crazy-addictive?) he finds the Redfin site. Personally, I get much more excited by the technologies behind PropSmart and Trulia. Those sites seem to have added to cool aerial photos with some real focus on the user interface. Redfin gives you great information about individual houses and even shows you the lot line, but it doesn’t give you any medium- to big-picture information. Neighborhood and city pricing information is worth much more than a single house’s historical sales (and this is coming from the dude who has only historical sales on his site).

I think it is interesting how an interview can really bring out the best and worst in somebody by just letting them talk. More articulately than anyone else I’ve heard from Redfin, Glenn describes the company’s lack of focus. For instance, he talks about how every state is different and national websites can’t accommodate that. Next, he talks about how he’s going to expand down the West Coast and all over the country. He talks about how cool the site is and how technology is changing, but gives digital photos of houses as an example of this trend (that was cool 5 years ago!). Even in vegan-city Seattle, I want to know where’s the meat to go with this fluff? When asked what’s driving traffic to Redfin, Glenn says “because it’s an awesome site.” I think I would have gone with “aerial imagery, property outlines and past sales data.” And if they don’t add to that list, they risk becoming just-another-mapping-site.

A while back, Anna wrote this article that showed how Redfin wants it both ways with real estate agents… and it is interesting that while Glenn is new to the staff (he started in September), he inarticulately describes this same conundrum that Redfin faces.

He says,

we’re not trying to serve the real estate agents… sell people out to real estate agents… what we’re trying to do instead is serve the consumer directly…

But when pressed by John about how Redfin makes money, he says

How do we make money now? People sign up for a real estate agent… The real estate agent and Redfin share the fruits of that.

Which essentially means “by selling customer names to agents.” I’ll give him credit – I hate the housevalues model and find it to be really sleazy and maybe there really is something to be said for waiting until someone requests an agent. However, they are not, as he says, “trying to do something totally different.” Redfin is just leaving more money on the table and, possibly generating higher-quality leads. I’m going to read into this, though, and say that they don’t plan on working with agents for long – note his question to himself “How do we make money now?”

Dustin says “it is not hard to read between the lines that he’d really like to squeeze those agents out of the business if only it wasn’t for those “great” relationships he’s built up with a few of them.” I agree. Late in the interview he emphasizes how he wants to balance the business model:

… balancing our business model. We’ve got real estate agents that are partners, that we still value enormously, but we want to make sure we keep the focus on the home buyer and seller who is the customer.”

Word to agents: now that we have funding, you are not a priority.

This is my favorite part:

If you walked into Redfin, all you would see are engineers and a customer support person.

-Galen
ShackPrices.com

FSBO will not take over the world

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And with a title like that, I might just eat my words. There was an interesting story in New York Times story about FSBO yesterday. It describes a (ugly!) FSBO online service in Madison Wisconsin that has grown immensely over the past few years. I feel a little like a curmudgeon when I say this, but I agree with the sentiments of the real estate agents quoted – FSBO sites don’t directly threaten the real estate brokerage industry. That said, the real estate agents are just as wrong about their own business if they think that margins won’t drop and market conditions won’t dramatically change over the coming 10 years.

As I see it, this is a great illustration of a large scale change that the real estate industry (and many other industries) is undergoing right now. Consumers today have vastly more information available to them, which means they rely less and less on a realtor to guide them through the process. Imagine (as I must) what it was like 15 years ago as a home shopper; you either drove around the entire city to see what was for sale or asked a realtor to essentially do it for you. The realtor held the cards and had the computer system with all the information. You, as shopper, really couldn’t make a short list of 5-10 houses you were really interested in without the help of a realtor. Today sites are springing up left and right to give consumers lots of information.

Today, home shoppers can (but don’t necessarily) figure out exactly what they’re looking for, sellers can get an approximate value of their house with free tools (like by site, ShackPrices.com) and in the end, are real estate agents really do not provide the same service they once provided. Supporting my assertion is Steven Levitt’s research that shows the extra amount that real estate agents make on sales of their own home versus the homes of their clients has dropped over the past 10 or so years (which I maddeningly can’t find a link to now); customers today can much more accurately assess the value of their home without a real estate agent.

Ms. Miller and Ms. Murphy, however, built a separate and alternative listing service – a parallel market, much like the Nasdaq, which rose in recent decades to challenge the New York Stock Exchange’s dominance and sparked competition that eventually reduced transaction costs for all stock investors.

This is an interesting, but misleading comparison, at least for the time being. Consumers can look up Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange quotes from the same place and can buy those stocks from the same people. In fact, your broker will be happy to sell you stocks from either market. My real estate agent will not be happy to sell me a FSBO property and I certainly can’t look them up on Windermere’s web site.

These cracked me up:

To real estate agents, “for sale by owner” conjures up some cranky tightwad trying to sell an overpriced, ramshackle house. Agents utter FSBO as if there was something foul stuck to the bottom of their shoe. “It’s a commission-avoidance scheme,” said Sheridan Glen, manager of the downtown Madison office for Wisconsin’s biggest real estate broker, the First Weber Group.

Kevin King, executive vice president of the local Realtors’ association, runs the multiple listing service but says he pays no attention to FsboMadison. “It’s not important; I don’t follow it,” he said. “I don’t even know the people.”

First – commission avoidance scheme!? That’s like saying the classifieds are a low trade-in value avoidance scheme for cars. This looks much more like a agents-aren’t-worth-six-percent scheme. The problem seems to be that even the discount brokers aren’t doing a good job at covering the market; Madison effectively has a (usually) 6% commission market and a no commission market. The future is probably somewhere between, with most agents working on a flat fee model (Steven Levitt agrees).

Agents swear up and down that they’re worth every dollar they charge, but is that usually the case? Here’s a scenario: A friend of mine moved to Seattle last year and decided he wanted to buy a home with his girlfriend. They looked at a few places and decided they would buy a townhouse that wasn’t yet finished. They picked the place they wanted after doing much research on their own and then hired an agent to do the paperwork and cover the details. They effectively worked out a flat-fee agreement, which the agent was happy to sign.

FYI: the NYT article really struck a chord and has been the most emailed story for the past two days now.

Galen
ShackPrices.com

Real estate is a smaller part of American's income than ever before… and rent is an even smaller part

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Yesterday, the New York Times reported that “Twenty Years Later, Buying a House Is Less of a Bite.” Two points on this:

1. It’s a macro-level article and points out that housing on the coasts is not necessarily a deal:

In high-profile places like New York and Los Angeles, home to many of the people who study and write about real estate, families buying their first home often must spend more than half of their income on mortgage payments, far more than they once did. But the places that have become less affordable over the last generation account for only a quarter of the country’s population.

2. They entirely ignore the fact that 20 years later, most things are cheaper. For instance: food, beer, wine, appliances, computers, telephone service, and so on. Some things, particularly services, have become more expensive, but the most important thing when you’re talking about the relative cost of houses, rent, is still cheap. An older article from the New York Times points this out:

In the Bay Area of California, a typical family that buys a $1 million house – which is average in some towns – will spend about $5,000 a month to live there, according to the Times analysis. The family could rent a similar house for about $2,500, real estate records show, and could pay part of that bill with the interest earned by the money that was not used for a down payment.

Seattle is not the Bay Area, but owning here is still much more expensive than owning in Dallas. I think this fits with anecdotes about buying rental properties. Twenty years ago, it was fairly easy to buy a rental property in the Seattle area and have the rent pay for repairs and the payments; you could earn equity for the cost of finding tenants. Today, the search to find a property like that is a challenge.

So will house prices plummet or flat-line this year? I don’t think anyone can say. A lot of people seem to be betting on increasing prices (they are still buying rental properties), however I believe that the stock market is beginning to bet against builders because they fear an over-supply of housing. My advice: If you have above 50/50 odds of staying in the same house for 10-20 years (unlike most Americans), you should definitely buy. If you can’t save money to save your life, maybe you should buy because your home could serve as a sort of inefficient savings scheme (again assuming you won’t sell right away). If you really value owning a home, buy one. Just don’t expect prices to continue increasing at the same rate as they have over the last 5 years. And don’t get an interest only loan!

-Galen
ShackPrices.com