Author: Greg Swann (page 155 of 209)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

FBS Blog:

Think about this: Trulia’s brand is trumping the franchise brand, requiring payments to Trulia, and the franchise brand is trumping the brokers’ and agents’ brands, requiring payments to the franchise. At the same time, the brokers and agents in the field are building the business relationships that form the foundations of the all the brands. They’re doing all the work and they’re having to pay very dearly for lead generation that the web is supposed to be making more efficient. Efficiency for Trulia and Realogy, perhaps, but it doesn’t look very efficient for the brokers and agents.

Check. I think working Realtors need to work without ceasing at developing sources of business that do not require you to give up half of your own deal to cling to the other half. Forget commission relief. There are way too many mouths to be fed upstream.

These business models don’t work in the long run. There’s a fascinating post today on O’Reilly Radar about how Google and others, in their quest to “free” information, need to be careful not to destroy content creation. Here’ a quote from a Google employee, I find highly relevant to MLS today: “”Some think of Google as selling search. Some business types think it sells ads. I think it needs to be in the business of ensuring there’s something to sell ads around.” Yes, exactly. We need to protect content creation, especially the content that’s hard to create, like broad, deep and standard listing information.

Sooner or later, the brokers and agents will figure out that they are paying too much money to Trulia or their franchises for these leads and that they can do it more efficiently through cooperation. This brings me back to the MLS, back to local decisions in the best interest of all competitors. The MLS can and will figure out a way through these challenges. The specific business model for data aggregation and sharing on a broader scale may not exist yet, but the solution exists in a framework of trust allowing MLSs to foster a national non-advertising listing portal controlled by the brokers and Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Trulia Blog:

Trulia was selected by the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), New York City’s largest and most prestigious real estate group, to power the first real estate search engine dedicated exclusively to New York City-based listings.

More:

What does this mean?

For consumers, the new search engine will bring together residential property listings from REBNY-member real estate brokerage firms onto a single public Web site for the first time. For the non-New York readers out there…it’s worth noting that Manhattan’s hugely important real estate market does not have a widely used MLS that would allow access to all listings through any single Web site today.

A few dozen ambiguous fields is not an MLS system, but it’s better than what New Yorkers have now. And, who knows, maybe the horse will learn to sing…

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Realty.bots will make sellers happy

We talked last week about the move by Realogy Inc. to supply millions of real estate listings from its national brokerage chains to upstart Realty.bots Google Base and Trulia.com. This puts the Realty.bots on the map. Who else is affected?

Sellers should be happy. Realty.bots are really not effective real estate search tools, but they are excellent home shopping sites. Listed homes will be exposed to thousands of users who might not have seen them on Realtor.com or local brokers’ Web sites.

Buyers could be happy. Trulia.com can seem like the Disneyland of real estate: Bright colors, interactive maps, even a Google Earth interface.

But buyers might stop to reflect that a Realty.bot listing is not very different from an exclusive listing. My wife and business partner, Cathleen Collins, was out with a buyer who saw an “exclusive” sign and asked what it meant. Her answer was concise and stingingly accurate: “It means they don’t want you to have representation.”

In fact, Realty.bot listings normally are not exclusive listings. They just look like it. When you click through for information, you are contacting the listing agent directly — or the listing brokerage or brokerage chain. If you proceed with the purchase of that home, you will either be unrepresented or you will be represented by the listing broker. You will not have your own buyer’s agent.

Realtors probably should be unhappy with Realogy’s move. Realty.bots tend to cut buyer’s agents out of the transaction altogether. This won’t save the buyer any money. The listing broker will just get paid double.

But listers also have cause to be unhappy, because the listings Realogy is providing to the Realty.bots will click back to Realogy, not to the listing agent or brokerage. My thinking is that their plan is to sell listers the leads their own listings generate.

It’s a brave new world in real estate. It will be fun to see how this plays out.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What’s half-way between a Zestimate and a real appraisal? Lenders and borrowers are eager to get the benefit of the doubt of a full appraisal without the full-blown doubts incurred with an Automated Valuation Method.

Enter Zaio.com, which is building a nationwide database of drive-by appraisals — really driven-by appraisals. From the San Jose Mercury News:

Zaio started off as a little-known Canadian company founded by Brad Stinson, an appraiser who tinkered with software. Stinson, now vice president of business development for the company, still has an office in Calgary.

Although the company has a low profile, recent hires such as Douglas Vincent, former chief collateral officer with Countrywide Bank, and John Ross, former CEO of the Appraisal Institute, a national organization in Chicago, are making people take notice.

“Our goal is to have information on every home in America,” said Tom Inserra, president and chief executive officer of Zaio from his Scottsdale home. “We already have hundreds of photographers and appraiser trainees and are deploying them around the country quite rapidly.”

The photographers have been sent to 170 cities in the past two months, covering the territory and sending it back to Zaio’s servers. Although the cities of Mesa, Ariz., and Spokane, Wash., are completed, part of the first wave is the Bay Area, and Brentwood seems to be the start of an estimated 80 million homes that will eventually make up Zaio’s database by 2010.

Inserra said that many Web sites have taken aerial photographs of homes, but the system was lacking real-life photos. The information isn’t available to the public but to banks, insurance companies and lenders who will use the service to help determine appraisals objectively, he said.

Zaio’s workers are required to go through a background check, wear company ID and clothing and hand out pamphlets written in both English and Spanish to anxious homeowners. The company also alerts the police department they will be in the area.

“We don’t invade someone’s property or try to sell them anything,” he said. “We’re also the only company we know who will let the homeowners opt out. … If you call Google, they won’t take your Read more