The Blogfather promises houses of the future and delivers… everything but the house. The real deal is here, but, as with everything “of the future,” the best is yet to come…
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Blogging (page 77 of 84)
Today brings a game effort by David Gibbons of Zillow Blog to address Zillow.com’s disclosure/disclaimer issue. The problem for me is that the material he cites is at least one click deeper than where he puts is and two clicks deeper than where it should be. Even worse, the page he cites makes even more extravagant indefensible claims than does the Zillow.com home page.
This much, snipped together from David’s text
A Zestimate is really a starting point in figuring out the true value of a house. A Zestimate is not an appraisal.
would be perfectly adequate — if it were placed prominently on the Zillow.com home page and any page from which a Zestimate can be run. Of course, the extravagant claims would need a pruning, too…
But: This is incremental progress, movement in the right direction. Good on ya’, David!
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Busted!
Mark Ijlal of the Michigan Foreclosure Blog caught a Realtor kiting his feed — and the plagiarist auto-implicates herself!
There is so much casual plagiarism among weblogs, I’m delighted to see someone get nabbed so so dramatically…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate
This is completely inside baseball stuff for webloggers running the Akismet anti-comment-spam plug-in. If that ain’t you, you can safely press on.
Now then: Akismet doesn’t kill spam, of course, it just locks it up it in secret CIA prison camps hidden in friendly foreign dictatorships–no, wait…
Akismet quarantines suspected spam, but it’s up to you to inflict the actual act of spamicide. You have to do a spam-scan one or more times a day to make sure that there are no false positives — genuine comments misidentified as spam. The rest go to the spam-grinder.
If you only have a few spam comments to look at, it’s no big deal. I found, however, that I was collecting hundreds of detainees every day. True spammed comments, no question, many involving combinations and contortions that cannot actually be possible for normal human beings.
The Akismet server failure a couple of weeks ago brought all this most acutely home, since some spam comments were leaking through and many others were piling up in the moderation queue.
Which led me to a discovery…
Most of the spammed comments were accruing solely to one post, with another one catching the vast majority of the remainder. The implication was, if I were to turn off commenting in those two posts, I would effectively inoculate BloodhoundBlog from most comment-spam before it even got to Akismet — and without installing a captcha kludge.
Guess what? It worked. I get between five and zero spam comments a day. There is no risk that I’ll scroll past a valid comment in my rush to throw out all that very dirty trash. There are two old posts that won’t take comments — but there is no possibility that they would have gotten any in the first place. Presumably, in due course, some skeezy spambot will penetrate (ew!) another post, so I may have to effect the cure there, too.
Will this work for you? Don’t know. Look at your spam comments and see if there are particular posts that are being gang-raped, as it were. If there are, turning off commenting for those few posts may turn off your Read more
Sellsius&176; digs out the details in Redfin.com’s Terms of Service. Very interesting reading…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
In other words, is every agent a sub-agent of the seller? If so, can you take a moment to share your thoughts on the idea of buyer-brokerage with Christine at NY Houses 4 Sale?
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Rey Estate: Make things simple!
In The Trenches: There’s gold in them thar data!
The Property Monger: Scuse me while I Zillow the sky…
Hamptons Real Estate Blog: Home prices are stable, but the Zestimates are surging.
Rubbing elbows with Nubricks gets Real Central VA, The Real Estate Tomato and BloodhoundBlog in The London Times Online. And you thought my English was hard to read!
Sellsius° counters: Write it so they can read it…
True Gotham: Give buyers real control.
The RE.net has been itchingly acrawl with creepy stories about creative mortgages and imminent doom. I have no idea how many of those loans have already been refinanced, but, whether or not they have, there are a hell of a lot more happy mortgage stories than sad ones. Behind the Curtain (blogrolled for sheer effrontery) on negative-amortization loans: “A hammer’s a great tool until you have to paint a wall, right?”
Ardell says buyers and agents need to feel each other out before committing to each other. I don’t hate this idea, provided that buyers remember to nail down the terms of their representation before they run out and fall in love with a house.
Bubbleboys: This is what you’re looking for: The Lord of the Bubbleflies: Lean-looked prophet whispers fearful change, cultivating the worst impulses in otherwise decent people…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Dustin at Rain City Guide is giving stat-dancing lessons today. I am neither as talented nor as interested as he is, but I do have an interesting statistic to reveal: Debunking Zillow.com is averaging well over 100 unique hits a day. All of my extended Zillow rants do very well, and Debunking Zillow.com comes in third if you Google on “zillow.com” — which many visitors to BloodhoundBlog are doing every day. It pays to keep things in perspective: Our Zillow traffic can’t hold a candle to that which is landing directly on Zillow.com. But for anyone looking for a second-opinion, and apparently many people are, it’s right there on the shelf next to the branded product.
There are two memes I hear all the time in the disintermediation debate that I think are incorrect. The first is the implication that anyone who expresses a skeptical or negative view of one or more of the dot.com RealtyBots is either an actual luddite or is in some way frightened by technology, disintermediation or simply change in any form. The second is the idea that disintermediation in the real estate industry will — or will not — take the course followed by travel agencies and stock brokerages.
For the first meme, I can discern no evidence whatever. It’s a caricature composed of characterizations rather than quotations with supporting links. Surely I would qualify as a technophile of at least the second rank, and my objections to Zillow.com and Redfin.com have nothing to do with technology, fear or even the idea of disintermediation as such. Zillow.com is deceptive in its portrayal of what it can and cannot do, and Redfin.com is a cowbird that incubates its buyer representation commissions in the listing agent’s nest. I am one of the most pro-innovation Realtors on the planet — and, in case you didn’t notice, yesterday I proposed an innovation that will, as a secondary consequence, obviate Redfin.com’s current business model. What I am opposed to — and what every honest person should be opposed to — is unethical behavior.
For the second meme, I think both the “will” and “will Read more
Ahem:
I am rooting for an epic housing collapse, a disastrous recession, the collapse of the stock market, a complete replacement of our current partisian leadership, a questioning of our country’s current economic model, and a severe and historic financial meltdown.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate
Daniel Rothamel musing on “Million Dollar Listing”, a real estate reality show on the Bravo TV network:
The fact that dual agency is legal had to be the direct result of Satan himself lobbying real estate commissions all over the country. The only person that EVER benefits from dual agency is the agent. His wallet gets fatter, and the buyer and seller get less representation. Only Satan would call that fair.
Actually, that would make a fun “South Park” episode: Satan versus Saddam at the Department of Real Estate.
I watched the show for the first time last night, but I was playing my guitar (loudly and badly, the way god and Leo Fender intended), so I missed a lot. I did see one agent who was clearly torquing her clients to buy when they weren’t ready to buy — way over the line. I think this might be the dual agent Daniel is talking about. But later in the show the buyers seemed to be completely happy. Maybe they were awed by the TV cameras and didn’t want to make a scene. Maybe they don’t understand reality TV…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
(This teeters right on the brink of being either gossip or a pissing contest. I want to document the facts in a permanent way, but I won’t be in the least offended if you press on without reading this.)
One of the interesting defects of the enblogged globe is the de facto Memory Hole effect. If I change the appearance of a weblog, every page will reflect those changes, as though they had been that way forever. If I change a post, it’s changed forever, with no reference to its past form. There are various web-based Wayback Machines, but there is no built-in version history so that you can track what I have done — perhaps with an eye to judging my motives.
It could be there is no Memory Hole at Redfin.com’s weblog.
From a comment by Glenn Kelman at Rain City Guide:
Regarding that reference, I had tried to explain that we deplore a particular tactic, not real estate agents, and I apologized. Later, before returning to this blog, I removed the reference from the blog, and inserted an apology with the same prominence as the original reference. This is because I respect Dustin, because I regretted the implications of my own statement, and because we all believe in fair, civil discourse.
And, indeed, this is the way that particular text appears on the Redfin.com weblog’s home page and at this permalink:
But there is no Memory Hole. The original entry is still on-line:
The reader comments are copied from the old version to the new, but the old version has not been supplanted by the new version, but, rather, duplicated and then edited.
I am drawing absolutely no inferences from this, simply taking note of a body of facts.
Further notice: I just went to set the trackbacks for the two separate permalinks — and they’re the same.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
…an exploration of the benefits of real estate weblogging, is up at The Real Estate Tomato.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
From comments at Rain City Guide. I didn’t address this weblog entry from Redfin.com CEO and broker Glenn Kelman because I wasn’t sure how to strike a balance. But today, Dustin Luther offered this:
For those that haven’t seen Glenn’s comments on his blog, I highly recommend heading over to this post.
In case it wasn’t clear, Glenn is clearly not worried about making friends with real estate agents, and even compares listing agents (who don’t want to show their properties to Redfin buyers) to praying mantises who eat their pray: “a grisly illustration of realtors’ hopeful but incorrect argument that showing their own listing can procure cause for garnishing the buyer agent’s commission.”
P.S. Greg: he has a special treat over there for you as well…
This was my reply to him:
> Greg: he has a special treat over there for you as well
I saw it last night. I concluded that the man is a jackass and a fool. In rank order the fools would seem to be 3. Kelman’s clients, 2. Kelman himself, and 1. Kelman’s investors.
Debunking Zillow.com gets dozens of unique hits every day. Let’s go get sued, a blueprint for bringing litigation against cowbird brokers scores fourth when you search for Redfin.com. I think the people at Zillow.com have been very deft in the way they have dealt with criticism. I think Kelman is drunk on his own publicity. The route to fame can be long and uncertain. But it’s just a short hop from there to infamy…
Hustling uninformed newspaper reporters is one thing, but I’ll bet the man doesn’t have the guts to defend his business model in public against an informed questioner.
Further notice: Kelman adds a comment at RCG.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Taking on the New York Times’ fawning coverage of Redfin.com, Jim Kimmons at Transforming Real Estate details the details behind the cooperation/compensation model of real estate brokerage:
The contention that the listing agent should be pleased to show an “eager buyer” the home when they come with no agent is just not going to function in the way presented. Let’s say that I’m a listing agent and have say 20 listings. I know that many homes get shown upwards of 40+ times before selling, but let’s use 30 for an example. Also, I’m not sure how you can call someone an “eager buyer” when you’ve never met them and they’ve never seen the home, except in a drive-by. Now, using an hour each as a conservative example, if every buyer was a Redfin client, then this listing agent would work about 600 hours and drive a lot of miles in meeting “eager buyers” at their listings. Buyer agents do this all the time, but that’s what they get the 3% for.
Don’t stop there. There’s a lot more that Jim covers.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
…is up and running at Nubricks.com.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing