Looks like it’s a Northern Virginia brokerage.If you haven’t seen Roost yet get acclimated here:4Realz, Bloodhound, AgentGenius. There’s lots more, but these will get you started. My favorite part of the site?But – how long until individual agents sites can participate?
Browsing Category Technology
Zillow might be right(er)
Get ready for it – “marketing” a home may be free, sooner than we might expect. The successful Realtor’s value will come from managing the transactions and representing the clients’ best interests. Zillow’s zestimates soon might very well be right “enough” for some. Zillow’s zestimates might be more right today than they were yesterday.
From TechCrunch –
Zillow is trying to create a database of all homes in the U.S., which is a different approach than other real-estate sites. “It is the database of all homes, not just homes on the market,” notes Frink. This is both a strength and a weakness.
Current and historical data about all real property is immediately and easily available directly from the Gateway …
Zillow, and other private entities striving to succeed, are more fluid, more adaptable and more driven to succeed in a timely fashion than is the National Association of Realtors. It is really that simple. For now, Realtor.com has the best data … but for how long?
I’ll stick by what I wrote in August of 2006:
… what if Zillow’s reach becomes so great, their data become so vast and inclusive, that their Zestimates significantly impact what is fair market value? What if the purchasing and selling population refer to Zillow as the end-all, be-all estimator for their homes’ valuations? What if “close enough” is “good enough”? What if they become the de facto standard for home valuations?
Perfection with regards to a property’s valuation is a fluid thing, a moving target dependent on the “right” buyer who is ready, willing and able.
Can their data aggregation ever mitigate and/or minimize sufficiently the potential impacts of those unzillowable features? Doubtful, but they may be able to minimize the impact of the data’s shortcoming, provided they are accurate elsewhere. Might Zillow become just another tool used by Realtors?
I didn’t get the press release and can’t find a full copy of it, but I didn’t see that Virginia was one of the 11 states where they are adding data. Charlottesville, Albemarle and Fluvanna are still “back woods” territory with accuracy levels of one star …Â but not so back woods as Greene, Nelson, Waynesboro and Augusta – they aren’t even listed on the zestimates page. A quick spot check of a few houses in Charlottesville, Virginia and Crozet, Virginia revealed that the zestimates are wildly inaccurate. From a “valuing-a-home” competitive stance, they aren’t yet a threat to competent Realtors in the Charlottesville market … yet. (Update 9 May 2014: All of Central Virginia (except Fluvanna?!) are still all rated – by Zillow – as having one-star accuracy.)
Realtors’ complacency and dependence on the MLS will be their downfall … Zillow, et. al. “get” that the data needs to be accurate; many Realtors don’t. Here’s a thought – what if Zillow starts charging Realtors for access?
Much, much more at Bloodhound, Kris and Jay.
Focusing on the wrong tools
A couple of weeks ago, the Charlottesville Albemarle Technical Education Center held a panel to discuss ways to implement technology in the classroom.Marijean Jagger, Waldo Jaquith, Sean Tubbs, Jim Bain, and I were some of the “tech folks” invited to participate along with several members of the Charlottesville and Albemarle School systems.What technology did we recommend? The “tech” folks in attendance agreed on many things, most strikingly that focusing on which tech tools to use was not the best use of resources.Reading, writing, critical analysis, independent thinking, independent research – from multiple, often contradicting sources – these were the skills that the tech people thought should be the focus…. By the time bureaucracies figure out how to use Facebook, something else likely will be emerging to take its place.Changing gears, the argument is often made that “we’re in the real estate business, not the technology business!”… Fragmentation of the message will continue in 2008, but there will be an equally vigorous effort to reassemble (and profit from) the disparate messages and mediums.Dustin said it perhaps best:I really don’t care if its a new CMS, new listing tool, new social network, new blogging tool, new MLS backend, or new analysis reports… If you can get enough consumer eyeballs, the real estate agents will follow.Same goes for the school system.
Who says microblogging isn’t effective?
Twittering and Texting about Realtors
Fragmented search with Zillow and Trulia
Searching for homes in the Charlottesville (or any area) is easier than ever – and more confusing and fragmented…. The local MLS, despite its clunky interface and consumer tools, offers the most comprehensive search available.The tools Trulia and Zillow provide and the interfaces they offer consumers (and Realtors) should be forcing Realtor.com and local MLS’ to innovate and create better user experiences. I’m curious to learn what Move.com is up to.From yesterday’s WSJ:For starters, users can enter a city, town or ZIP Code and see a listing of every home for sale, sortable by price, address, number of bedrooms or bathrooms, broker or type of home (single-family or multi-family)…. (bolding mine)For the 22901 zip code, one of the primary zip codes for Charlottesville:Trulia – 216Zillow – 77CAARMLS – 290Realtor.com – 290 + 6 multi-family + 2 Farms + 72 land listingsFor Crozet (22932), a town just west of Charlottesville:Trulia – 137Zillow – 148CAARMLS – 113Realtor.com – 113 + 55 land listingsThis is the perfect opportunity to refer to a post I wrote in January – Where do you Search for homes In Charlottesville (hint: it’s more than the MLS).This post was shamelessly stolen from Jay and localized for the Charlottesville area.
The NAR Gateway inches out of the box
Read it in today’s Inman before it goes behind the pay wall.”We think that there is a demand by practitioners wanting to have all the data they can, and having a database that has all properties throughout the country and is as deep and as rich as we can make it is only going to enhance the practitioner, whether they use it in their own community or they use it in looking up something for a relative in another state … to help them understand what’s going on in that different area.”Consumers and Realtors want the same thing – every property, and its history in one place. Here is one of the keys – The Gateway, unlike MLSs, would not allow the offer of compensation and cooperation, he said, “at least not initially.”Buyers agents would have to negotiate their commissions independent of what is being offered through the MLS…. (hint: Divorced Commissions)Disclaimer: I happen to sit on the reference Group and will be at another meeting on Monday.
Trulia says – Two Foreclosures in Charlottesville?
This post started as a breathless analysis of how great Trulia’s new foreclosure search is, how I would use it every day, tell my clients to use it,(everybody wants to learn about foreclosures) how Charlottesville does not have an effective or efficient method to search foreclosures, and how I and my buyer-clients would be able to use Trulia’s new partnership to our advantage.But. The data’s just not there (yet).A quick baseline:- The local MLS shows 1306 active properties in Charlottesville and Albemarle.- Trulia shows just more than half – 699 active properties in Charlottesville.The discrepancy is likely partially attributable to a difference of semantics when searching – when searching the MLS, I request listings in “Charlottesville City and Albemarle County;” when searching Trulia – Charlottesville does not necessarily include Albemarle…. basic data accuracy issues that come from maintaining such a large database of properties without direct reciprocal accountability to the listing agent.This is likely a very useful tool and one that will be very useful – but it’s only a step in the right direction…. They offer far more peripheral information to the consumer than the local MLS does – but for now, the local MLS beats the pants off of their property database.*one of these days I’ll figure out how to use their API and embed these searches in my website and on this blog.