Riding in the cab today from CHO to IAD, I had the pleasure of riding with a graduate from the Naval Academy. We talked and in passing, he asked if I knew (deleted) who was his Realtor when he purchased four years ago. I acknowledged that I did. His response was – “I found him to not be a man of his word.” Damn. Four years. If anyone ever says that reputation is not the single most important facet of one’s profession – one’s identity – they have no idea what is honor.
Date Archives August 2006
The MLS is merely a guide
With every day of innovation and aggregation by competitors, the MLS is becoming fast becoming a guide toward property offerings and valuations rather than “the” or even “a” definitive source. There are at least two reasons for this change – 1) The innovation of data aggregation competitors with whom many are familiar – Zillow, Homegain, Trulia, Yahoo, AOL, Google, the list seems to grow every week…. 2) Realtors seem to have taken the MLS for granted as something that has always been and will always “be there.”The MLS is in the process of devolving/evolving into just another data source. The root cause is the lack of accuracy of the data input by the agents. To be the best data source, one has to input the best raw data. That simply has not been the case for some time, due partially to the strength of the real estate market for the past six years, but also to simply laziness and lack of accountability. How can one maintain a market lead when the data lack integrity?What differentiates the MLS from its competitors is the offer of cooperation between Brokers and the fact that at this moment, the vast majority of properties are marketed through the MLS. The MLS remains the single largest aggregation of property data out there.
Real estate Carnival
The Property Grunt hosts this week’s national real estate carnival. The perspective that can be gained by a national, yet first-hand view of the real estate market is invaluable.
Way off topic, but – AOL is scary!
I am not even remotely smart enough to understand the ramifications of this, but AOL has released tons of personal search data into the wild. If you value your online privacy, take a few moments to read this story. To those of you who still have aol email addresses – please, please for the sake of all that is human, understand that those raised eyebrows you get from people when you tell them your professional email address is “blah-blah-blah @aol.com” – it’s for a reason!When I find the time, I might download the file and analyze who is searching for “homes in Charlottesville” and send them a hand-written note asking for their business. Now that would be a personal touch!
Market Data for July 2006
The past few months have seen some significant changes in our market. It’s not just the interest rates, though – they’ve actually gone down a bit of late…. *Active in July 2005: 456Active in July 2006: 418% change: -8.33%Contingent: -16.74%Pending: -29.31%Sold: -20.02%In short – the market has slowed…. Surprisingly, there were fewer properties on the market in July 2006 versus July 2005, but fewer of those are going under contract. The greatest jump in new-to-the-market inventory was in the second quarter of this year…. From an aggregate point of view, May, June and July – There were nearly 4% more properties on the market for this time period in 2006 when contrasted with 2005, yet not nearly as many going under contract. March/June/JulyActive: 3.82%Contingent: -2.32%Pending: -13.48%Sold: -5.62%Bottom line (except for the *): Real estate remains a wise investment. Everybody’s expectations need to be re-evaluated: buyers have time to decide, sellers need patience and agents need educating.*these are only for those properties in CharlAlbemarle, Fluvanna and Greene.
Challenges facing Realtors
1) Disintermediation2) No longer control the data3) Technology is evolving more rapidly than ever4) Consumers’ perception of empowerment5) The Market shift.
Clustering, Phasing and Mountaintop Roundup
There has been much discussion in the past several days and weeks about the future direction of Albemarle County’s growth. The decisions about to be taken by the BoS may have a profound impact not only on the Albemarle County real estate market, but that of the surrounding counties as well. If Albemarle becomes more of a no-growth zone and CharlAlbemarle remains the employment hub of the region, house prices will be impacted, roads will be impacted and discretionary income will as well, due in no small part to rising fuel prices.If the BoS does in fact make building in the growth area easier/more streamlined and restricts building in the rural area, we will see different patterns of development than we have seen for the past several years. These very local decisions will have regional implications.Bacon’s Rebellioncvillenews (Cascadia)cvillenews (North Pointe)CvilleTomorrow (Crozet & Cascadia)CvilleTomorrow (North Pointe)Fascinating Podcast – if you do nothing else, take the time to listen to this.