Tag Archives: MLS

More real estate mapping: MLS Maps Online

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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 🙂 ) 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

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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

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[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!

Buyers and Sellers: Help is on the way…

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I’m pretty sure that many real estate agents wouldn’t want to hear this, but the real estate industry has been very effective at protecting their own self-interest at the expense of home buyers and sellers. There are so many useful tools that could be built, but valuable real estate data is hidden behind thick walls! But rather than focus on the problems of the industry, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about the future…

If you’ve been reading Rain City Guide long enough, you probably know that last May I put together the first home search (“gHomes

Discount brokers…

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[photopress:donald_playing_guitar.jpg,thumb,alignright]I had a long discussion with my grandfather this past weekend regarding the utility of full-service realtors. He’s been around quite a while, so I have no intention of dismissing his opinion on anything. Especially considering that he’s been an investor in real estate for most of his life.

He point blank asked me why anyone would use anything other than a discount broker to sell their home. He mentioned that on a typical home sale, they could easily save you a couple thousand dollars in commissions. He mentioned that if he had to sell a house, he would list with a discount broker, price it a little higher than he would be willing to accept and then negotiate to an appropriate price. For him, this strategy comes right out of a Capitalism 101 course that we all learn along the path of life… And then today, CNN mentions a related issue in one of their top stories:

The article discusses how some discount brokers are complaining that they are not getting access to the multiple listing service (MLS). I know nothing about the background of this story, but I do have an opinion on discount brokers.


My take on using a discount broker?
Discount brokers play an important role in keeping full-service real estate agents on their toes and are definitely here to stay. For some people, a discount brokerage makes a lot of sense, and will get them a fair price for their home. However, a typical discount brokerage is not going to provide the value added services that can potentially raise the value of a home substantially. What are you missing out on by using a discount firm?

  • Preparation. Home preparation (including staging, painting, gardening, and other simple improvements) can make an otherwise ordinary house extraordinary. Owners sometimes have a hard time being objective about their belongings, and an experienced real estate agent will make sure that your house house really shines.
  • Marketing. This is where a savvy real estate agent can really earn their commission. A really nice house can only sell itself if the people show up to look! A tech-savvy agent can create brochures, flyers, slideshows, websites, newspaper ads, CDs, etc, that are beyond the capability of the typical home owner.
  • Pricing. My grandfather’s comment about pricing the home a little higher than he would have liked and then negotiating down might not be the best bet in the current market conditions. I’ve found that fast moving houses seem to be selling for the most money and the fastest moving houses are the ones with LOTS of interest. The best way to get a lot of interest is to price the house a little low and let a bidding war begin. While this doesn’t work for every house, and especially houses that are truly remarkable (and therefore only appropriate for a very small subset of buyers), it does seem to be a very successful strategy for most homes in a hot seller’s market as Seattle is currently experiencing.
  • Presentation. Once again, many owners have trouble being objective about their home. When potential buyers visit, an owner is often tempted to tell stories about each room. While the stories might be great, they don’t allow potential buyers to “imagine” themselves in the home. A potential buyer is much more likely to begin imaging how things can be redecorated and personalized if an agent is showing the home.
  • Time. A well prepared, marketed and presented home takes a lot of time, and many owners simply do not have the skill and/or time to do it as well as an agent.

In the end, if you are using an agent who is just rolling through the motions, then you may do just as well to use a discount broker and sell your home yourself. However, if you find an exceptional agent, you will inevitably find that the work that they are doing and their stored up knowledge about the local market conditions will allow your home to sell for substantially more money.

gHomes — Seattle Area MLS on Google Maps

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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/

New Home Search Tool

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Google Maps on CraigslistPaul Rademacher (out of UNC Chapel Hill) has built an awesome tool for searching for homes based on craigslist data. If you are looking for a home, definitely consider checking this resource out (if for no other reason than to see the future of home search!):

Craigslist Home Search on Google Maps

Such easy-to-use applications have the potential to minimize the importance of the MLS (the real estate agent’s lifeblood)… Hmm…

Thanks for bringing this to my attention zlayde!