Agents: Are you prepared?

[photopress:richard_williams_mining.jpg,thumb,alignright]In response to my post highlighting how great the technology behind Trulia is, I received some emails from real estate agents who completely disagreed with me, although only one agent, John Lockwood , took the initiative to responded on the record). Thank you John! I’m going to pick on your comments in this post only because you had the willingness to state a lot of agent’s fears publicly… With that said, I continue to welcome your feedback!

Hoarding the data? Thatโ€™s a good one. Have you seen my Sacramento Search Page โ€” to name just one place where Iโ€™m not hoarding it? I make my living publishing the data, and Iโ€™m licensed to make my living publishing it.

John, I clicked on your search site the other day for the first time, and I felt like I’d seen the site a million times before. The search is bad and does not serve your clients well. Sure you’ve published the homes that are for sale, but you haven’t added anything of value that I couldn’t get from 1000 other real estate sites in Sacramento. You haven’t taken it to the next step and provided anything particularly useful to your potential clients. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the goal of your search site is to tease your potential clients so that they will call on you to find out whether or not a particular home will work for them. And I don’t blame you for any of this because the coding required to build a more interactive site that would really serve your clients is very tricky. In reality, you are running on a business model that has been very successful and easily replicated all over the country.

I want a real estate search site that provides more useful information? I want recommendations. I want to know if the home is a good value. I want to know if the neighborhood is appropriate for me. You’re website provides none of that… and I’m not a good enough coder myself to implement any of these improvements. I think the search site that you offer lacks so much consumer friendliness, that I don’t even bother putting a link to my version of it on this site’s sidebar. Making interactive websites that improve with user experience is what gets the self-proclaimed web geeks all excited and sure that Trulia represents the first example of real estate entering the next version of the web.

[photopress:polina_vasily_stalin.jpg,full,alignleft]While the times are changing in the real estate industry, I think the majority of people WILL always want some expert advice before buying a home. It is not like buying a plane ticket, and consequently, the internet will not replace real estate agents in the same way it has replace travel agents. A home is simply too big of a purchase for most people to feel comfortable making it over the internet.

Onto another of your points, I wish I could say that I had more respect for a real estate license, but I don’t. (Considering you are from California, you might be interested to know that I’m licensed to practice traffic engineering in your state.) Recently, I decided it might be useful for me to have a real estate license, so I spent $250 and took an on-line course. It was the “60-hour” course that is required before you can take the Washington state exam. It was so easy, I doubt I spent 30 hours in total reading through their material and answering the multiple-choice questions. For comparison, I had to get a four-year degree and spend month’s studying before I was ready to take the all-day traffic engineering test. For me, all a real estate license means is that the person meets a minimal level of competency. It is all too common to find a licensed real estate agent who is simply not knowledgeable enough to do a good job. You have to search much harder to find a licensed lawyer, doctor, or engineer who simply cannot do their job.

Reading through the rest of John’s comments, I only have one general “big picture” comment. Nobody owes real estate agents anything, least of all their clients. That is an important enough comment to repeat in a different form. Home buyers and sellers do not owe real estate agents anything. Maybe it’s just the engineer in me that hates inefficiencies, but if someone else can provide a tool that makes home buyers and sellers better off, it is the real estate agents that need to adapt. Buyers and sellers should not have to adapt to an inefficient system designed by real estate agents for the benefit of real estate agents.

[photopress:hurley_patterson_cousins.jpg,thumb,alignright]So where does this leave us…

It won’t take long for the industry to see some major changes. It may be through Trulia and their opt-in database. It may be from some type of Craigslist on steroids (think Google Classifieds). It may be the product of a dream from Rich Barton or Barry Dillar. Whatever the solution is, it is being created right now and it will provide huge benefits to home buyers and sellers. All this is happening while NAR still has it’s head in the sand and is worrying about whether or not discount brokers can get access to MLS listings

Does this mean that every real estate agent is going to be out of a job in a year? No way! There are still so many people that require the expert handholding of a well-informed agent. However, it does bring up some interesting questions for real estate agents who rely on the internet to get clients:

Are you preparing for a time when everyone will have access to better information? How? Are you just planning to fight these changes? Most importantly, do you have a web strategy to take advantage of these changes?

Trulia better real estate search

Just as the pun is obvious, the implementation by Pete Flint and his crew at RealWide of a new real estate search engine is obviously awesome… Their new real estate search engine available and can be found at: Trulia.com

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, then you know I’ve been following the development of new mapping technologies pretty darn closely and this is far-and-away the best implementation yet. Pete and his crew didn’t take anything for granted and put together a whole new real estate search engine! I mentioned that this site was coming out a few weeks ago, and the implementation lives up to everything Pete told me it would be.

So here’s some features I like love:

  • The search interface is as simple as entering a city name or a zip code! The UI is beautiful.
  • The filtering by other features like Price, Bedrooms, Bathrooms and Price is fast and very intuitive!
  • When click on more detail for a listing, you get the VERY useful information like the price per square foot, the days on the market, as well as details for other recently sold homes and similar homes in the area!
  • The color coded recently sold homes is awesome!
  • I really like the the location of your search is stored in the url. This allows me to easily save and or send an area of interest. For example, here are the homes for sale in the part of Los Angeles where I grew up: http://www.trulia.com/CA/Eagle_Rock/90041/. (Also notice that it has neighborhood facts on this page.)
  • It has RSS feeds so that I can subscribe to my zip code and be updated each time a listing comes on the market.
  • And the best part is that I’m sure there’s more I’m going to like, but I’ve only had a few minutes to play!

I really liked the site when I first saw it, but the more I play the more my opinion of the site improves. The best part is that I’m pretty darn sure that if I keep playing with the site, I’m going to find more gems! This site is a true work of art! Thank you Pete!

The only problem I see with it is that it is not available for Seattle (yet!). THIS IS A HUGE DRAWBACK. I want Trulia! And Pete, I’ll wait for a little while, but I’m not a very patient person! ๐Ÿ™‚

UPDATE: I just got an email from Pete and he says “You’ll be pleased to hear our primary focus is building out coverage to other states. No promises when Seattle is live, but we’re working hard on it.” I’ll try to be patient!

Latest stab at on-line mapping

Eating LeavesGalen over at shackprices alerted me to a new google maps search by Windermere. I can’t say that I’m surprised to see that Windermere updated their search since their VP of technology told me they would be releasing something soon… None the less, it is always interesting to see what gets produced. My initial reaction is that they’ve built a really clean home search tool (note that they still consider this a BETA site).

Out of the sites that I’ve seen, this is currently the best home search (MLS search) site. Some features I like:

  • As you zoom in to your area, the number of available homes (based on your search criteria) gets updated. This works real fast demonstrating that the Windermere people have thought-through their spacial analysis backend.
  • It is integrated well into the standard MLS search. Nothing will surprise someone who has searched for a home on the internet.

If you are looking for a home in Seattle, I’d highly recommend the Windermere tool. Although there is some good news for all the other people building home search sites. The Beta site that Windermere has published does not do anything really innovative, so there is still plenty of room for someone to break the field wide open. I’m still waiting for someone to use the power of the web to improve search results.

Even more on-line real estate tools in the works…

trampolineJohn Cook’s Venture Blog had an update to the Zillow story… and this time it has to do with the relationship between Zillow’s founder (Rich Barton) and the man (Barry Diller) who bought his company, Expedia, who just happens to be developing a new real estate brokerage that will begin operations in the Pacific Northwest.

My guess is that Barry Diller wouldn’t be venturing into the real estate brokerage business unless he felt he could use his Internet empire to create something of unique value. (Otherwise, if he really wanted to own a traditional real estate company, he could just buy one of the many local firms!) My guess is that he (and the people at realestate.com that work for him) are developing a home search tool that they feel would really benefit consumers. From what I’ve read of Zillow, they are definitely building some type of system that will simplify (or at least improve) the home buying/selling experience. My guess is that Barry Diller up to something similar?

On a side note, I really like Tom Dozier’s insight that we are quite possibly seeing a bubble of local real estate sites! With each passing day, I feel more confident that the real estate search landscape will look completely different one year from now… With the only people guaranteed to win in this situation being the home buying/selling public!

Also of interest, I received an email today from someone of the big real estate firms here in the Northwest where the writer let me know that they have already developed a home search site based on one of the on-line mapping services, and that they will likely be rolling the site out in the near future. This confirms my suspicions that sites like MLSMapsOnline and ShackPrices will really have to develop some major innovations (and this doesn’t just mean more or less pull down menus!) or they can expect to be quickly forgotten. From what I’ve seen so far, any major player (Microsoft, Windermere, RealEstate.com, etc) could build a comparable site for less than $50,000, and while $50K might mean something to these start-ups, it is almost inconsequential to the larger firms.

More real estate mapping: MLS Maps Online

South Lake UnionThanks to a tip from a reader, I found out about a new home search site (MLS search) that is worth highlighting:
http://www.mlsmapsonline.com

The site uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology to plot MLS listings. The idea is great, but the implementation is definitely lacking some key features. For starters, if you are a Firefox user (like me), you’ll be presented with this message when entering the site:

“We’re sorry. MLSMapsOnline.com is an IE only application. Please download the latest version of Internet Explorer to continue to this website.”

What a bummer! I’m surprised that people still write programs that only work with IE. Under most circumstances, I just ignore sites that don’t support Firefox, but in this case, my curiosity for new map-related MLS searching was greater than my dislike of IE. By the way, don’t even bother to try to view this site with a Mac, I had to use my work computer (as oppose to my home computer) just to test-drive the site!. Now that I’ve acknowledged this major drawback, I’ll move on with my review…

Some things I like:

  • The mixing of flash technology and Microsoft’s mapping technology makes for some really smooth visual searching. It is extremely intuitive to navigate the site. The future of home search is definitely visual, and this site is getting us one step closer.
  • The ability to search by “Listed Date“. The rest of the search controls will be pretty familiar to anyone who has used an MLS search.
  • The ability to log-in and save search results is nice, especially since they do not require it to use the site.

Some things I dislike:

  • It is worth repeating that an IE-only tool is really pathetic, especially when it doesn’t even work on the IE version for a mac!
  • The site design really encourages the user to define a city and/or county to search, when the best way to get to an interesting area would be to zoom in on that city. In other words, if I’m searching for homes in north Seattle, why limit me to the city limits. If I scroll north of Seattle, I want to see the homes that are for sale in Shoreline.
  • The search options are pretty minimal. A user should have access to more advanced search options.

At this point in time, it is one of the better home search options for people in the State of Washington (assuming you’re working on a PC and willing to use IE). However, I happen to know that there are a few more MLS search sites that will come on-line soon that will be using similar technology, but won’t have as many of the limitations. The layout they’ve created is not all that different from the standard MLS search and would be pretty easy to duplicate, which leaves me still waiting for a break-out search site.

It’s worth repeating that I’m definitely interested in hearing about more of these technologies. (I find this topic much more interesting than bubble talk ๐Ÿ™‚ ) If you know of another interesting home search site available for Seattle residents, I’d love to hear about it!

UPDATE:
1) MLSMapsOnline went live with a version that works well with Firefox! (that was a really fast update!)
2) The VP of Technology for Windemere emailed me to let me know that Windemere also offers a map for viewing homes for sale via their PropertyPoint software. I’ve played around with their mapping software before and it definitely impressed me a year or two ago when it came out. However, I’m pretty sure they are using an ESRI ArcServer backend and that technology seems dated. I definitely think that the future is in running a backend using Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. Besides being extremely expensive to run, ESRI server-side software is way too difficult to implement for there to be much innovation using this software. Leave it to the big companies (like Windemere) and governments (like MTC) to run ESRI software, while the rest of us take advantage of the mapping wars that the big internet companies are waging!

Shack Prices

Picture of Homes on RiverShack Prices (which I mentioned a few days ago in the comments section of this post) just went live. Their site gives the sale price of King County homes (including Seattle!). Their reason to be:

Shack Prices was created with the hope of giving people as much information about home values as possible. We realized that there were many websites that show you prices of homes on the market (i.e. homes that haven’t yet sold) and some websites that would sell you information about comparable houses nearby, but no sites that let you pick the comparables and the area. The difference between Shack Prices and realtor web sites is that Shack Prices shows the actual price that each house sold for versus the price that someone hopes their house is worth. You can use it to virtually appraise your home or a neighborhood. We hope it helps you as buyer or seller.

In playing around a little, the site seemed pretty darn intuitive. If you are interested in getting a rough idea of how much your home would be worth on the open market, just insert your bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet. If there is not a lot of data in your area, extend the time-frame out a year, instead of the default three months.

If I had to give a critique of the site, it is that they borrowed a little too heavily from the typical home search websites instead of re-thinking how an “appraisal” site might work. For example, if I’m going to appraise my home, I know precisely how many bedrooms and bathrooms are in the home. Why do they have the option for a range? Also, my experience in estimating a home’s value is that some other data fields within the County’s home sales database (like the home’s style code) is much better than the number of bedrooms at indicating the estimated value of a home. The number of bathrooms plays a minor role at best, so I wouldn’t have even bothered with that field. Granted, some of my suggestions might take some user training if they are used to the more traditional home search, but it would be a more valuable tool.

With that said, if you are living in King County and interested in an estimated value of your home, Shack Prices is a great place to start. However, if you want something a little more robust just ask any real estate agent. ANY agent looking for more business will prepare a “Comparative Market Analysis” for free and the agent will likely be more experienced at weeding through the appropriate data fields to develop a better estimate of your home’s value.

Congratulations to Galen for making this happen and check out Seattle Real Estate Talk’s post on Shack Prices…

more on real estate search technologies

[photopress:Ballard_RR_Bridge.JPG,thumb,alignright]In researching the options for different real estate search tools, I came across an interesting site called NeighborhoodScout. The idea behind the site is that it would help people moving to a new area find an appropriate neighborhood. I think that the idea is great, but my brief investigation came across some serious flaws in their implementation. For starters, I couldn’t get their algorithms to recommend a neighborhood in Seattle despite my effort to tweak my entries to things I thought would cause their algorithms to recommend Seattle. Instead the site kept recommending Bothell, which is a nice place to live, but not the neighborhoods I was looking for… Another major flaw is their pricing mechanism. The $20 fee to use the interesting parts of their tool seems like a major momentum killer for any website. As I alluded to yesterday, data wants to be free!

I have found a few other neighborhood sites, but they tend to be pretty focused on a local market. For example, Sustainable Seattle has an excellent site that maps demographic and environmental data for Seattle neighborhoods, but my current interest is in sites that have attempted to analyze real estate demographics on a neighborhood level based on national data.

Does anyone have any experience with NeighborhoodScout? Do you know of another neighborhood finders? I’d be very interested to hear about it!

gHomes Update #2

Bright Water SchoolAbout a week ago, Google made an update to google maps (gmaps) which caused errors to my gHomes MLS Search (built on top of gmaps).

I finally found some time to get around to making updates to my coding so that my MLS search would work. In the process, I’ve streamlined the data conversion process, so that it now only takes me a few minutes a day (if that) to update the MLS. While the MLS search is not nearly as smooth as I’d like, I still think it is one of the most interesting ways to search the homes that are currently on the market.

The current version searches all the homes listed in the City of Seattle. I’m in the process of adding additional Cities and neighborhoods. I’d also like to add “sold” information, but that will also take some time. If you are interested in seeing where I’m going, check out:

http://raincityguide.com/ghomes

gHomes Update

Bus Tunnel StitchedI’ve been slowly making some updates to the gHomes site. Today’s improvement was to add a link from the Google minipages to more detailed information.

If you are new to my site, then definitely check out my alpha-version of gHomes … I hope you’ll find it is the best way to search for a new home in Seattle.

(Do you know where the photo from this post was taken? Here’s the satellite image…)

gHomes — Seattle Area MLS on Google Maps

gHomesIn my continual quest to give my clients better and more useful real estate information, I’m experimenting with posting the home sale data over Google Maps and I’ve finally got an alpha version ready for limited public consumption. There are no forms to fill out or hoops to jump through, all you have to do is click on this link:

http://www.RainCityGuide.com/gHomes/

Some notes on the the project:

  • MLS data includes all of Seattle, Kirkland, Bellevue and Redmond
  • The coding is not very advanced stuff (I’m not much of a coder at all!), so be merciful in your comments!
  • The database is missing some MLS listings for a variety of reasons and is only updated once a day. Some listings are missing because the agent filled in the address wrong, while other listings are missing because the agent purposefully did not include the address (this is very common on VERY expensive listings)
  • This is meant to be a fun toy to test out the limits of what’s possible in the real estate industry. Please use it accordingly.
  • Make sure you turn on the “Satellite” view
  • The easiest way to zoom in on an area is to select and icon from that area and then use the scroll bar to zoom into it!
  • Initially, I plan to update the data on a daily basis

Other great google mapping sites include:

Improvements I’d like to make:

  • Add higher quality aerial images a la DASNET
  • Add condos
  • Provide a link to additional listing information directly from google minipages
  • Add more areas in the Puget Sound

Thank you Louis, Ken, Phil and Paul for your help and inspiration!

Of course, if you are interested in seeing any of these homes (in person!), just let me know! Enjoy!

http://www.RainCityGuide.com/gHomes/