Tag Archives: Zillow

10 Great Conversations

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Just for fun, I started recording notes on real estate conversations I enjoy following and I decided that when the list hit ten, I’d hit publish:

  1. David Smith has a great (no wining allowed) article about the housing bubble. I only wish David interacted with the real estate blogging community a little more because his stuff is great but easily missed…
  2. Continuing on the bubble topic, Dan Melson puts on a great effort describing why renting really is for suckers (and what yo do about it). For me, this is a great example of why real estate professionals should not write about the bubble (David Smith being the exception! 🙂 ) It reminds me of the “fool“ish investment advice so popular in 1999/2000 that said it didn’t matter what price you bought a stock at as long as the company was good, you would make money in the long-term. Here’s my problem with this argument… If rents are cheaper than the interest payment (i.e. both of these being the completely sunk costs) and home prices go down slightly in the near future (which doesn’t seem inconceivable for selected markets in the country), then no amount of number juggling will replace the fact that if a potential home owner would be best served waiting to buy until the prices bottom out. I realize there are more than a few “ifs” in my statement, but my goal is not to say that it is a bad time to buy, only that a blanket statement “it is always a good time to buy” falls on deaf ears.
  3. On a related note, it is timely that the NYTs notes that rents are rapidly rising across most of the US (with Seattle being a highlighted area!).
  4. Greg shows off his custom signs. I think these are brilliant marketing moves and every agent should look for ways to market themselves through their listings. Beautiful stuff…
  5. And talking of beautiful ideas, Claudia Wicks mentions a very simple marketing idea ($1.50 simple) that could go a long way… There’s a beauty in simplicity (and it reminds me of an idea that Anna and I were batting around a while back…)
  6. And if you really want beauty, Fraser Beach takes staging to a new level by hiring actors (beautiful ones!) to play house during an open house…
  7. It takes a certain level of confidence to have fun with your previous mistakes. (Kris is clearly a confident agent and I like that!)
  8. ActiveRain is getting some hype from both the Real Estate Tomato and the Future of Real Estate Marketing. I definitely think that Matt Heaton is onto something interesting, and he doesn’t get particularly phased by either Greg or Joel, which I think is a great sign.
  9. Because I’ve been there…
  10. Greg (Linden this time!) creates a list with (nearly) all the Seattle start-ups and their associated Alexa rankings. It is a list that is definitely worth checking out as you might be surprised at the massive activity within the Seattle start-up community! For those interested, the rank of the real estate sites were: Zillow (976), Homepages (21,720), Redfin (22,117). RCG was not included in his list, but we are ranked at 75,844. You might also be interested to know that despite the fact that we’re not ranked as high as some of the other sites, our reach is right up there with HomePages and Redfin. (not bad for a site with no paid staff and $120/year hosting fees!). And since I mentioned ActiveRain earlier (and they are based in Kirkland), I think it is interesting to note that they are seeing awesome growth in the number of pageviews that is blowing away all the local real estate sites save Zillow. Considering their Alexa ranking is only 108,655, they are obviously creating a sticky user experience.

Zillow vs. “average” agent

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When I wrote my “Baby Takes a Bow” piece which took about 30 seconds, I knew I was opening Pandora’s Box, and would have to back up my one liners with some extensive writing on each topic outlined therein.

My definition of Pandora’s Box is the one one that attributes “the box” to a “woman’s womb” from which new life springs forth. While I do not necessarily agree with Inman’s new three part series on negating the mls offering started yesterday, or all of David Barry’s undertakings around the country, clearly I am not the only one trying to pry open Pandora’s Box. The box WILL be opened! Whether the DOJ or David Barry choose in the end to take the ultimate credit, truth is, it is just simply time for the box to be broken open by everyone at once.

If we all take out our respective crowbars, the box will open. Who takes credit for having opened it, and clearly David Eraker and those who came before him will deserve some of that credit as well, who takes the ultimate credit is irrelevant. In fact the DOJ is my best hope for getting the credit, so that the “new life that springs forth” will be on a national scale as only the DOJ can do best.

In this quote from my most recent beginnings of a very long explanation, you will quickly see just WHO Zillow can replace, which by current accounts and statistics may be up to 90% of the industry as it exists today.

“If you stand up from the computer with the value in your hand before you go to the house, and you stand by that value after you arrive at the house, because the computer “SET” the value…you are giving the seller the equivalent of a Zillow produced valuation…which is FREE. Any agent who thinks a computer spits out a home “value” via a CMA Program, is easily replaced by Zillow.”

To some extent, those who wrote those great CMA programs, like IRIS/Lightning and Top Producer and way back to Coldwell Banker’s very first CMA software which predated them all, are responsible for agents believing that a computer can value a home.

To a greater extent large brokers, and local mls classes, that mislead new agents into thinking they can “value a home” on day ONE after they receive their license, by using these programs, are even more responsible for this thinking.

When the Pareto Principal changes from an 80/20 rule to a 90/10 rule, as was told to me in Real Estate Broker Classes, with only 10% of agents being competent, then it is time. It is time for Pandora’s Box to be opened. It is time to stop that snowball from rolling down the hill, it is time to stop that train that doesn’t seem to have brakes. It is time to roll back the clock and begin again.

Contrary to Inman’s new series, we do not have to roll the clock back 35 years to the beginnings of the mls. We only have to back up to the day that buyers were supposed to become “1st class citizens”, and begin anew from that point. Because an agent who cannot value a home for a seller, cannot with any sense of credibility, value one for a buyer either.

What else is Zillow good for?

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If your Zillow Zestimate is higher than what your home sells for, than you will likely have no trouble appraising for the buyer’s loan, AND you can let it bid up if you get multiple offers without fear that it will not appraise.

If the Zillow Zestimate is lower than what you are able to sell your house for…don’t count your money until after the appraiser leaves, and be sure to take the offer with the most money down, and the buyer who is willing to make up the difference between sale price and appraised value in cash.

The Accuracy of a Zillow Zestimate

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[photopress:2faced000.jpg,thumb,alignright] Much has been written about the accuracy, or lack thereof, of the Zillow Zestimate of a home’s value. What one must remember is that a property can sell at the low point or the high point of its Zestimated range.

I don’t pay much attention to the articles written on bubbles bursting and what kind of market we are in, because I always know what kind of market I am in. I feel it in my bones, the same way an old person can tell that it’s going to rain before the weatherman predicts it. I know just how far I can push a price in either direction, depending on market conditions and who I represent in the transaction.

Every agent wears two hats and is two-faced, because a home’s “value” has to be higher when I represent a seller and lower when I represent a buyer, and it is my “job” to “make it so”. The Zillow range of value represents my best hope for my buyer client at the low end of the range, and my highest hope for my seller client at the high end of that range. I have yet to meet an agent in the Country who can jump back and forth over that line as well as I do. I guess that makes me two-faced, but being very good at being two-faced has always been my forte.

When I represent a seller I try to get the seller to give me the key to his house for a couple of days and go away and give me “carte blanche”. Mainly because I look very odd when I am “doing my seller thing”, somewhat like “MONK” at a crime scene. I keep going out to the street and walking up to the house, at various paces from all directions, emulating a buyer getting out of the car from every possible available parking spot. The neighbors must think I’m looney.

I trim trees and bushes based on the angle of the “walk up” and what I can see and what I can’t see. “Good, that bush blocks that window frame that needs painting…bad, that tree is blocking the main feature, the rounded brick archway…then I trim the tree to “accentuate the positive” until I can see the brick archway from the position of the buyer driving by or getting out of the car, and leave the bush overgrown to “de-emphasize the negative”.

I walk into the front door 25 or more times and change things, until I remove any negative influence in my sight pettern (which is eye level side to side, without looking up or down). I always tell agents, “if you are standing in one place when you are staging a home you are “decorating” and not “staging”. Walk through and walk fast. Remove negative influence or distract the eye away from the negative with a bright vase or photo in the opposite place from the negative. If you can’t eradicate the negative, draw the eye toward the positive. That is staging, and that is why the agent has to do it themselves and not hire landscapers and decorators.

Staging is about the real estate, and a real estate professional must be in charge of what will and will not be done, to enhance the sale price.

Conversely, putting on my other hat, I take out my other face when evaluating homes with buyers. We both step into the house, and usually I walk one way and they walk the other, and I see things quite differently than they do.

They say they “love” it and I say “Oh, my God WHY?”. I get them to focus and point to what they like. Sometimes by forcing them to tell me what they like, it turns out to be a painting or a piece of furniture. I say great, let’s find that painting to put in your new house, but for now let’s go back and try this again and look at the “real estate” of this place. Sometimes, if it is vacant, I actually have to move the staging so they can see what I see.

To achieve the lowest possible price for my buyer, I either have to find a seller who has “left money on the table” or I have to find a property that is overpriced. If a house could have sold for $510,000 or $515,000, but the seller priced it at $519,000 and staged it incorrectly, I can usually get it for $500,000. That’s a standard best case scenario. If a property comes on at less than fair market value, which happens on occasion, I can usually swoop in and modify terms, to grab it while the vultures are still hovering.

Often people comment on the Zillow Zestimate wondering “Where exactly is the value of this house? Is it closer to the high end of the range or the low end of the range?” The answer is it is the agent’s job to pull “the value” in the direction of their client. When I represent the seller, I have to DO something before I hit that “live on the mls” button that makes it go higher. When I am representing a buyer I have to DO something to force it back in the other direction.

I pretend that all my clients are Captain Kirk, who command me to “make it so #2” 🙂

Why I like Zillow and Redfin by ARDELL

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[photopress:3ofhearts.jpg,thumb,alignright]I’m still scratching my head as to why agents around the country hate Zillow so much that they want to call it “Z”. Theory is that if they even whisper the name Zillow, they are spreading “the word” and helping it to become even more popular.

Zillow is a system of mathematical calculations, a tool that is easy and fun to use. So isn’t hating Zillow like hating your calculator?

I like Zillow because before they came along, all of the lead generators were about buyers. Buyers went there to look at houses and hit the big flashing “Find an Agent” button and were taken off to never-never-land where the lead generator collected a toll. Buying buyer leads has always been a joke. I can hardly go anywhere without hearing someone talking about buying a house. Every coffee shop, restaurant, the lady in line in front of you at the bank, at least 20% of the people at a barbecue…really. If you need to buy a buyer lead you need to look in the mirror and figure out why you need to trick people into hitting a big flashing button and pay for one. Time to hone up your skills and get a personality.

The innovation of Zillow is that every lead generator has asked that question: “How do we attract SELLER leads?” Even House Values knows that they cannot get enough seller leads, and they can sell them as fast as they can get them. There are more agents willing to buy seller leads from House Values in prime areas, then there are seller leads to go around. There’s a waiting list…I know…I’ve been on it for over a year. Every time they email or call me I ask…you have a seller lead spot available for 98033 or 98034. Answer is always no, but they are trying to sell me something else. Because attracting sellers rather than buyers is something the lead generator industry has been very lax at doing well.

And then comes Zillow. I don’t know what they are selling, but they clearly have the seller’s attention. Did Zillow get an Inman award for that? If not…Zillow now has the ARDELL award for innovation in lead generating sites. Don’t be waiting for the trophy, I haven’t gotten out shopping for Greg and Sharon yet, and you’re behind them.

Kudos to Zillow. Don’t know where you’re running with that ball, but kudos for putting a seller oriented site in play.

I like Redfin, because…

a lot of my past clients who came to me from blogging,

tried them first 🙂

Corporate Blogs – Yes please!

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RSS IconDustin’s comments in his last blog post got me thinking (which is never a good thing). Dustin said “You just set my blogging efforts at Move back by a year or so”. To which I reply, “I hope not! You don’t have that much time!”

One of the cool good things that has happened recently is the rise of corporate blogging. What’s interesting is you’re finding them in places you wouldn’t expect. Did you know Dell has a blog, meanwhile Apple does not? I think it’s an excellent way for a company to get in touch with it’s customers (and vice-a-versa), without the reality distortion and corporate hubris that happens when communicating via a scripted “public relations firm” message.

You may be surprised to learn that even the venerable General Motors has blog (In case anybody from GM management reads this – Good luck turning the company around and keep up the great work at Cadillac and Saturn. I’m rooting for you). If a 100 year old company in the rust belt has seen the value of blogging, I have to wonder why hasn’t every large company? 

In case you doubt the potential of corporate blogging, look no further than Microsoft. Robert Scoble helped put a human face on the “evil empire”, by spearheaded Microsoft’s Channel 9 video blogs and wrote the book on corporate blogging. When he left Microsoft for PodTech, it created nearly as much news as when Bill Gates announced his “retirement”. An anonymous Microsoft employee, through his blog has changed the company for the better. Even though the Human Resources dept has a blog, and prominent engineers have them too, a small corporate blog can as useful as the MSDN blogging network is to the “Redmond Giant”.

I personally enjoy reading Zillow’s blog, RedFin’s blog, and Trulia’s blog every day. Even the HouseValues’ blog can be interesting on occassion (it seems like they have a fun corporate culture, even if they just sell leads for a living). But where is the John L Scott, Coldwell Banker and Windermere blogs? I know countless agents of those brokers and independent brokers blog and do it very well (I think I’ve seen most of them on Rain City Guide at one time or another), but where is the human voice of those companies? They should at least give me a way to search for their agent’s blogs. Are these brokers nothing but a logo for an agent to put on their marketing? They may not realize it, but I think they are losing mind-share (which may become market-share) by being silent in the blogosphere.

Which brings me back to my original question, regarding Dustin’s comment. When is Move going to get a corporate blog?

Although, Rain City Guide is an excellent blog, it’s not the most appropriate venue for Move specific information (nor should it be). Why hasn’t Move added RSS feeds to any page that offers e-mail alerts? How are Move’s product offerings better than other things out there? What cool stuff is Move is doing? Why would a Software Engineer want to work there? Why should a realtor advertise with Move instead of one of these “Web 2.0 upstarts”? Heck, why not feature profiles of happy customers (something HouseValues does well)? I’d love to hear somebody explain the the Innovator’s Dilemma that Move faces to your constituency, so they’d understand why Zillow, etc are steeling the mind-share that realtor.com used to have. What’s the best MLS in the country to deal with and why? If Dustin or his co-workers explained why things are the way they are, maybe somebody in a position to change things would read the blog and start talking? After all if GM blogs, the CEO of Sun Microsystems has a blog, and Mini & Scoble can change Microsoft, I think anything is possible.

I’m not trying to pick on Dustin, but I really want to add the Move blog to my RSS feed reader and I can’t!

Improving Online Home Valuations?

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This past week, Top Producer quietly rolled out a home valuation tool, called HomeInsight, for a few markets in California and Washington*. I was not part of developing the tool, but I like it enough to pass along the link to Rain City Guide readers before the local media picks it up.

What differentiates this product from others is that it not only includes sold data, but also real-time listing data. The result is a page of information for each home that includes:

  • an interactive map that gives details on ten similar nearby homes (5 that are for sale and 5 that have sold) and
  • dynamic charts that give the average/high/low listing price, the average/high/low selling time and the average difference between asking and selling price for the neighborhood of interest.

[photopress:image002.jpg,full,centered]

However, as with all things that sound too good to be true, there is a catch. In order to pull live listing information, the servers pulling this data have to go through an agent’s connection with their local MLS. (Don’t ask me to explain why, and definitely don’t ask Robbie, but anyone reading RCG for a while knows that the MLS’ have rules!) The result is it takes 5 to 15 minutes for the request to go to the local Realtor’s Top Producer account and then for the Realtor to initiate a report that pulls the data off the MLS servers (yes, a server call to the local MLS is necessary each and every time a request for a snapshot is made). Consequently, the only way to get your snapshop is from a link sent via email about 10 minutes after you complete the form.

So, how do you get a market snapshot for your home? Simply go to HomeInsight and fill in the required fields. (Remember it is only available in a few places right now!*)

If you don’t want to fill in the form, live in another part of the country, or feel guilty about sending people like Jim Reppond a “false” lead, then you can also check out this dummy snapshot filled with made up data.

And as much as I hate disclaimers, it is important to note that these are my opinions and my currently employer is not responsible for what I write on Rain City Guide.

* This tool is currently only available in parts of California (Hemet, Huntington Beach, Laguna Niguel, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Mission Viejo and Norwalk) and Washington (Bellevue/Eastside, Bremerton, Everett, Federal Way, Greater Seattle, Puyallup and Tacoma)

Real Estate Search Demographics

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If you haven’t seen it, Microsoft released a demographic tool that gives the estimated demographic for a search term and/or URL. Just for fun I threw a few of the major real estate technology sites (as well as the search term [real estate], kept track of the results, and that pushed this chart out of Excel:

[photopress:real_estate_search_demographics.gif,full,centered]

So, assuming that Microsoft’s numbers are correct, what patterns emerge?

  • The search term [real estate] tracked really low for people under 18 and high for people between 25 and 34 (kinda makes sense!), but none of the websites tracked near these extremes.
  • HomeValues and HouseGain… I mean HouseValues and HomeGain attract nearly identical audiences.
  • Trulia and Zillow attracted almost identical audiences as well (never off my more than 2% for any demographic)
  • Zillow had the most balanced demographic pattern with between 18% and 22% in each category.

Note the obvious: Microsoft only has demographic information on people who give it this information. This means that the data is just as suspect as the Alexa data.

Inman’s Innovation Awards!

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Congrats goes out to all the contributors on Rain City Guide! We were nominated as a finalist for the “Most Innovative Blog Award” by Inman News. In my world, contributors are not only the people with their photo up on the sidepanel, but also those of you who return to give your comments on a regular basis. This site thrives off of your continued involvement!

The winners in each category will be announced in SF at the Inman Connect Conference. I’m definitely going to be there (I’m speaking on a panel on lead conversion)… Additionally, I would really enjoy organizing a meet-up of bloggers one evening. If you’re interested in joining us, then leave a comment below and I’ll send details as things get closer!

[photopress:Luther_engineering.jpg,thumb,alignright]In the meantime, I’m not proud to say that I didn’t know many of the non-blog nominations so I spent some time this evening on google researching the other companies nominated. Here are some notes (or at least links) I took while scanning the other nominees.

Most Innovative Brokerage

I wish Inman provided some more context so that I could know why they picked these particular real estate brokers. If anyone can let me know what sets these firms apart, please share!

Most Innovative Web Service

[photopress:Luther_engineering_2.jpg,thumb,alignright]Most Innovative New Business Model

Most Innovative Real Estate Blog

Most Innovative Real Estate Data Site

[photopress:Luther_engineering_3.jpg,thumb,alignright]Most Innovative Technology

Most Innovative Mortgage Company or Service

Most Innovative Media Site

Most Innovative Rental/ New Home Online Service

Our Home is Now Listed!

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And despite the fact that we may not have Ardell’s magic open house touch, we are showing it on Sunday between 12 and 3PM as described in the open house listing on Trumba.

Update:

I also created an adword campaign around our home. If you see the following ad while surfing the web, don’t click on it because it costs me money and just takes you to this blog post! 🙂
[photopress:beautiful_ballard_home.jpg,thumb,centered]

Funny side note… I decided to try out Google’s option to target ads at specific websites and noticed that Zillow was on the list for real estate related sites. However, in order to see the ad for my home on Zillow, I had to disable the one-two punch of Adblock and Filter.G on my Firefox browser. By disabling these two extensions, so many websites that I visit on a regular basis looked so much uglier! It was like traveling the web naked! It you’re not using the firefox browser with these two extensions, then you are almost definitely surfing a web that looks much more annoying than mine!