Category Archives: General

Where the Streets Have No Name…

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Grand View
Part I: Background
Just when I thought I was getting a handle on the players in the future of real estate search, today’s news unleashes a whole new set of opportunities! “Homestore, Inc., the leading provider of real estate media and technology solutions, today announced that Elevation Partners, a private equity firm, has agreed to invest $100 million in Homestore…”

Since I’ve been covering real estate search, I’ve had numerous emails, chats, conversations, etc. from real estate agents who think that I should highlight more of the companies that are working to improve the MLS instead of the companies that are looking to replace it!

More than anyone else, Homestore represents the hope that someone will provide an awesome, nationwide, competitive real estate search based on the current MLS system.

Why? Homestore already operates the largest real estate database, i.e.the database that operates Realtor.com.

Now mix together (1) the only complete nationwide MLS database (that I’m aware of), (2) $100M to improve operations, and (3) some VERY accomplished tech visionaries, and I’d imagine that expectations are set very high.

For Homestore, Elevation Partners brings a former Apple star, a former Electronic Arts star, a Silicon Valley star, and of course, a rock star… There are enough opportunities to make one’s head buzz… I’m thinking:

  • Real estate listings on my iPod
  • Simcity interface for home search
  • Home listing videos done MTV-style

Okay, so maybe my head started spinning a little too much! Back on planet earth, I’d say that all the players (Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, Google, etc.) building innovative home search tools should keep a close eye on Homestore. They already “own” a complete and nationwide set of real estate data (ownership in the sense that they have “possession”!). Should they start putting together some innovative tools, they have leverage that others are going to find hard to beat!

Part II: Where the Streets have No Name
I want to run
I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls
That hold me inside
I want to reach out
And touch the flame
Where the streets have no name

Part III: Your Mission Should you Wish to Accept It
Imagine that you’ve been invited to 2800 Sand Hill Road to discuss the future of real estate with Roger McNamee, Fred Anderson, Bono, John Riccitiello, John Doerr, and Joe Hanauer.

What do you tell them? What features do you want to see in real estate search? If you are an agent, what is the biggest pain that someone could fix with a technical solution? If you are a buyer, what are the major gaps you see in the current system? What information do you wish you had?

I know that some of my readers have some great ideas. Please share as much as you’re willing. Remember that these guys want to work “within” the current system (i.e. cooperate with real estate agents!), and, most importantly, these people are thinking huge… $100M huge!

The State of Real Estate Search

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real estate search enginesTom over at the Seattle Property News summed the current state of real estate search with this question: “Is there a regional bubble in online real estate sites?”

From a consumer’s point-of-view, it is wonderful that home buyers (and sellers!) are starting to see so many options come on the market. I’ve really enjoyed following as more and more of these tools come on-line and I thought I would take today to review some of the posts I’ve had on real estate search. If you are looking to freshen up on the future of real estate search, there is lots of information (and links to more info) in the following articles:

As a fun little aside, when a new search site is announced I like to see the type of buzz that it is getting in the blogosphere. The chart from this post shows the relative buzz that Trulia, Redfin and Zillow have been getting.

Also, there are a few small search sites, like Propsmart, that I haven’t covered mainly because I simply don’t have anything interesting to say about them yet. However, if you are building (or have built) a real estate search site, I’m definitely interested in hearing about it!

Yahoo Maps is Now Driving Innovation!

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Yahoo Map of Seattle DestinationsI’ve been waiting (and searching) for a mapping site that gives multi-destination directions and the new (still in Beta) Yahoo Maps definitely delivers!

Here are some of the features that I have wanted to see in an on-line maps and how the Beta Yahoo Maps stands up:

  1. Multi-destination: This allows you to type in a bunch of addresses and get directions from one site to the next all on one map. This feature alone should make Yahoo Maps (beta) the default online mapping program for all real estate agents (and home buyers!). Thank you Yahoo!
  2. Best routing of destinations: theoretically, you’d be able to hit a button and have the mapping software tell you the most efficient route to get between multiple points. Yahoo does not have this feature (yet?), but they do let you manually change the order of your destinations! To do this, you simple have to drag the address within the sidepanel above (or below) another address.
  3. Remembering addresses. It is nice that Yahoo maps is integrated with my Yahoo Address book. The only problem is that I haven’t used my Yahoo Address book in years so all the addresses (and there are 100s) are old (including my “home”). It looks like it might be time to return to my Yahoo address book!
  4. Mobile Phone Integration: Getting directions via my mobile phone is currently a pain. I have a blackberry with internet access, but the current mapping sites are too slow and any misspellings require retyping things… I did try out Yahoo Maps a few weeks ago (and I liked that I had access to my on-line Yahoo address book), but, again, the addresses in my address book were so outdated, that it didn’t do me a lot of good. Seeing has how the Yahoo Maps has the “email map” and “Send to phone” options, it looks like it might be time to update my Yahoo address book!
  5. Live Traffic Data: I also like that Yahoo has integrated live traffic data (like freeway speeds). I’d be interested to see them add traffic cameras (Along the lines of Bus Monster).

Ideally, I’d like to be able to map out a bunch of homes while sitting at my home computer and email a set of directions to myself. All the addresses would be remembered (by Yahoo Maps) so that I could easily get an updated set of directions while on the road via my mobile phone. It looks like Yahoo is definitely going in that direction, but when I tried to email myself a map with four destinations, it only returned a generic map. I had similar problems trying to get a “printable version” of the map so I’m thinking that my problems might be related to the fact that I’m working on a Mac. Hopefully they will fix these issues soon!

And speaking of bugs, the beta version of Yahoo Maps did not work for me while using Firefox on my Mac. I had to revert to IE in order to see the graphics. Again, hopefully they will fix this bug soon!

One last thing before I call it a night… I played around with some of the programs that have been created with the Yahoo Map API, and it looks like they are finally at a level that is competitive with Google… My favorite mash-up so far maps out local events based on yahoo’s event calendar. Note that it would be really nice if this event mash-up had a city/zip search bar so that I could easily navigate from SF to Seattle, but instead, I had to zoom way out and zoom way back in is really nice that this program DOES have a city/zip search bar. (As Toby says in one of the comments: “For moving around in the events browser, you can highlight the city name above the map and type in a city or zip. It’ll jump straight where you want it to go.”) . Other than that issue, it It is a nice little program which I’ll definitely use again! I’m especially jazzed (or is it “rocked”) that I found out the Red Elvises are playing at the Tractor Tavern this Saturday! 🙂

Update 1: After posting this article, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one excited about the Local Event Browser. Jeremy Zawodny gives a good round up of all the excitement by Yahoo staff regarding the new map capabilities. I especially like that Yahoo has made an API for their geocoder. A free and easy-to-use geocoder is a major missing link from the Google Maps API. (what is a geocoder? In the simplest sense, a geocoder gives a latitude and a longitude for a given address.) It will be interesting to see if Google responds by opening up an address geocoder as well.

Tax Reform Hits Home…

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[photopress:soccer.jpg,thumb,alignright]CNN reports on some of the tax-reform proposals that have recently come out of a presidential panel. (note that none of these changes are law… yet… but rather they are just proposals and still have to go through congress.)

The panel recommended lowering the mortgage interest cap, which is the amount of a loan on which home owners would receive a tax break for interest paid, from $1 million to the average regional housing price in the range of $227,000 to $412,000.

The deduction would be converted to a credit equal to 15 percent of interest paid on mortgages up to the interest cap. A credit is a dollar-for-dollar reduction of the taxes you owe, while a deduction only reduces your taxable income by a percentage equal to your top tax rate. Deductions benefit high-income taxpayers the most and are limited to those taxpayers who itemize on the federal tax returns.

Generally speaking, the higher your mortgage loan and the higher your tax bracket, the more likely it is that you’ll see less of a tax break than you would under the current system. That’s because under the current system those in the highest tax brackets benefit most from the deduction.

CNN has more on how these changes could affect your tax bill here…

I really enjoyed Daniel Gross take on the issue in his article in his Moneybox column: Tax ’em Till They Turn Red.

In particular, he has a great description of the myopia experienced by both sides (i.e. blue-states vs. red-states):

Many of the people writing and talking about these issues suffer from one of two kinds of myopia. There’s blue-state myopia. Classic sufferers: Moneybox, Moneybox’s editors, many of Moneybox’s readers. These are people who think you have to pay seven figures to get a nice house with a nice yard in a nice suburb, or who think its normal to borrow $800,000 to buy a two-bedroom condo in a dicey neighborhood.

Then there’s red-state myopia. Connie Mack, the Republican ex-senator who is co-chairman of the tax advisory panel, is a classic sufferer. When asked by the New York Times Magazine whether limiting the deduction could “hurt the middle class and discourage people from buying, say, a $500,000 house?” he responded: “It depends on how you define middle class. I don’t think that there would be a large percentage of middle-income families that would have a $500,000 house.” Mack has obviously never spent much time in Staten Island, N.Y., where Vito Fossella, one of the few remaining Republican members of Congress in the Northeast, has already come out against the panel’s ideas. In the high-population, high-income states—the states that, by the way, produce a disproportionate share of federal income taxes—plenty of middle-class people live in $500,000 homes.

His analysis is definitely applicable to the Seattle market, where many people who would consider themselves squarely in the “middle-class” are living in $500k homes.

Photos of Halloween in Downtown Ballard

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[photopress:archie_mcphee.jpg,thumb,alignright]Our first stop on our Halloween tour was Downtown Ballard where hundreds of kids gather to collect goodies from the local merchants! It is always a fun time, and a little bit of sprinkling definitely did not dampen the kids’ enthusiasm!

For those wanting to get a peak at a typical Halloween in Ballard, I put together a slideshow on Flickr…

Enjoy!

Stressful living!

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[photopress:IMG_5046.jpg,thumb,alignright] In reading today’s Seattle Times article on people who have used interest-only loans to get into homes they could not otherwise afford, I get the feeling that some people are much better at living under constant stress than me! 🙂

It can be a wonderful experience to own a home, but it still doesn’t make sense to me why people put themselves in these situations. I’ve heard some darn good arguments from investors regarding why it makes sense for them to use interest-only loans, but for the rest of us, it feels too much like gambling…

Dean Baker sums up the I/O like this: “In a falling interest-rate environment, you may be saving enough to make it worthwhile. But … in a higher-rate environment, there may not be a loan to bail you out.”

To quote the same phrase Dustin used a few days ago with regard to hiring a lawyer, “A good night sleep should not be underestimated.”

GoogleBase Heads into Real Estate?

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Google BaseThe Search Engine Roundtable brings up the possibility that Google will slip into the real estate market as part of a much large (all-inclusive) database (or GoogleBase). This has a ton of potential and should Google get serious about listing real estate, this should be a major concern to all the people who are creating real estate applications (Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, etc):

There has been some talk this morning onto what will actually be included into Google Base, there are some nice screenshots that have come live this morning. Giving us a little glimpse of how Google thinks the world’s information should be organized. Here is a shot where you can post your items to Google Base and another shot where you need enter in some information about a house.

To get an idea of where they might go, check out this screenshot of a house listing. It is shockingly simple… but then again, the simple solutions are often the best!

Update 1: I was able to get into GoogleBase today and play around a little. I even found the “housing” page that is shown in the screenshot from above. However, when I tried to save a test entry, the system kicked me out. From my early preview, it appears that they’re building a “Craigslist on Steroids!”

Update 2: The NYTimes followed up on the idea of Google getting into real estate: “Among the many projects being developed and debated inside Google is a real estate service, according to a person who has attended meetings on the proposal. The concept, the person said, would be to improve the capabilities of its satellite imaging, maps and local search and combine them with property listings.”

“The service, this person said, could make house hunting far more efficient, requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses. If successful, it would be another magnet for the text ads that appear next to search results, the source of most of Google’s revenue.”

Update 3: The property grunt had an interesting take on Google Base.

The Rebirth of Redfin?

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[photopress:tyler_scott_01.jpg,thumb,alignright]In response to my recent slew of posts on real estate search engines, a reader (Amy Wu) left a comment asking if I’d ever tried Redfin. I’ve definitely tried Redfin and at one point I was a huge fan of their site. As a matter of fact, way back in March (before the days of plentiful google map-hacks), I mentioned how great it is to be able to get a birds-eye view of properties using Redfin. By the way, that was only my 3rd post for Rain City Guide (RCG)!

However, around June, RCG had a falling out with Redfin when they changed their business model to directly compete with Real Estate agents. One of the more interesting outcomes of my June post is that a former employee of Redfin wrote a long comment detailing some of his negative experiences while working at Redfin. After posting the comment, he asked that I delete it after David Ecker (founder and CEO of Redfin) wrote to him threatening a lawsuit.

However, I’m always willing to give people a second chance, so based on the Amy’s prompt, I decided to revisit Redfin. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they no longer mention the service I objected to. Go Redfin! I’m not sure if my posting had anything to do with the elimination of that poorly thought-out service, but either way, I’m pleased to see that they no longer advertise that service on their site.

So, in honor of my complete re-look at Redfin, I thought I’d compare them in the same method that I’ve been comparing sites like Trulia and Home Pages?

The Great:

  • Neighborhood Focus: Their interface makes it extremely easy to focus on local neighborhoods
  • Agent Integration: Their business model includes an easy way for agents to sign up and take part in their success!


The Good:

  • Stability: Their flash maps are much more stable than Home Pages (especially on a Mac)
  • Real Estate Data: Up-to-date date of homes-for-sale and sold-home
  • Personalized Mapping: Their maps are quick and don’t rely on another company’s service!
  • They’re Local: They serve (and only serve) the Seattle area (King County to be specific)

The bad:

  • They’re Local: They serve (and only serve) the Seattle area. I know from my stats that many of my readers are from other parts of the country/world, and Redfin simply will not help you at all!
  • Porting to other areas: I’ve heard for quite a while that Redfin was thinking of expanding to other areas, but their web-backend is apparently too complex to easily add to new areas. Having worked extensively with spatial data (GIS) for many years, I’m would not be surprised to hear that they are having problems adding new cities, but it is definitely disappointing. Along those lines, a service like Home Pages that relies on more generic neighborhood data (like school district data available from the Census District) has a much easier time going national!

The Ugly:

    Arrogance: When I talk with people from Trulia and LTD, I get a sense of excitement from the developers and a real sense that they want to hear how they can better serve their target market. The people at Redfin rarely return emails, and really don’t seem interested in hearing suggestions. I get the impression that they are sure they know the best way to serve the industry…

Regardless of their business politics, Redfin offers some pretty darn good real estate mapping features. If you are looking for a home in King County (Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, etc.), I would definitely recommend checking them out! But when looking toward the future of real estate search, I just don’t see much excitement happening at Redfin, so unless there is a major change in their direction, I doubt they will still seem like an interesting real estate search one year from now (let alone 5 years!).

gHomes?

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The Mercury News reports that both Google and Yahoo are in talks with CoStar Group, commercial real estate’s largest firm. With Google’s reputation for building clean and fast web applications and their vast source of neighborhood data from Google Local, they definitely have the potential to build a killer application.

Along these lines, there have been some interesting discussions around the web lately with regards to developing sites around Google Maps. Greg Linden reminded me of a conversation I had a long time ago with Paul Rademacher (of HousingMaps). Back in June, Paul mentioned that he was reluctant to build a real estate search engine using MLS data because (1) all of the data was owned by other people and (2) the mash-ups are so easy to replicate.

I thought that Search Engine Watch had an interesting addition to this conversation when they point out that the real winner of the API/mashup model is often the company that is opening their service up. The mash-ups are a great breading ground for interesting ideas… but that when push comes to shove, the mash-ups are really just providing a way for companies like Google to let others figure out what mapping add-on technologies are worth pursuing:

It also demonstrates what I told a journalist recently about APIs not perhaps being as altruistic as they seem. Give the world an API to your service, and it’s a nice way to let everyone develop new ideas that you might later decide to do yourself, if they seem successful. It’s like Google’s 20 percent time on steroids, because non-Google developers still end up doing work for you.

As someone very interested in the future of real estate search, I’d definitely welcome someone like Google in the mix because I think they could add some some desperately needed innovation to the real estate industry.