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What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

buildzoom.com

101–110 of 185 posts

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#101
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, this is true, and technically against the rules. Post Title and Article Title must agree. The poster must be popular or someone affiliated with the mods, else they would've had their posting rights revoked by now.

> Post Title and Article Title must agree No, the rule is "Please use the original title unless it is misleading or linkabit." That "unless" is critical. I wish we had some linguistic superglue to keep the two clauses stuck together—they always fall apart in shipping and the first bit is the only one people remember. > The poster must be popular or someone affiliated with the mods, else they would've had their postin…

Reorder the clauses perhaps?

> Unless it is misleading or linkbait, please use the original title.

It is common practice in legalese, and this may be the reason.

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#102

When I was searching for a house I used 5 or so apps to do so. I found that Zillow had many, many listings that were very old, but were placed up top and the dates changed to make it look like it was just listed. However, checking the actual data for that listing shows that it was not pulled from the market and relisted, it was just Zillow constantly boosting really crappy houses that had been on the site for a long…

> In short, trust none of them To amplify: I don't think it's any accident that the 2005 housing fiasco happened in this industry. Terrible pricing information (gaps + timeliness), as well as terrible conflicts of interest (buyers brokers are incentivitized to make the buyer pay as much as possible) make me wonder how much longer these dinosaurs are going to continue to operate the same way.

Do you mean the 2007-08 housing crash, or something else in 2005? If the 2008 one, it had a lot more to do with the financial side than the actual real-estate side, so changes in the real-estate sales process aren't likely to fix that problem. The "primary" dollar value involved in housing-price declines was significant but not really enough to cause an economy-destabilizing financial crisis. But the primary price declines in actual real-estate were multiplied many times over because the mortgages were all piled into heavily leveraged securities, priced based on risk models that turned out to be very inaccurate. That caused a crisis that ultimately involved dollar amounts greater than the total value of all the involved real estate.

A loose analogy: if you buy stock with 100:1 leverage, and the stock price declines 10%, you lose 1000% of your original investment. The big problem here wasn't really the 10% decline in stock values (significant but not catastrophic), rather the fact that you had 100:1 leveraged exposure.

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#103
post #70

Getting and keeping real estate listings up to date is a big pain in the ass. There's no standardized residential listing data, and while you might get RETS feeds or data dumps from the MLS nightly, it's still on you to ensure that all of the information is parsed correctly and displayed in accordance to the MLS'es standards (or risk being cut off). Often, MLSes have terms in their contract that say that regardless o…

aren't they still at risk of displaying mls data in a non-canonical format?

If they're scraping the site, then I'd assume they backed out of their contract for the MLS dumps and thus don't have a contract that says they have to display data in any format.

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#104
post #71

If Zillow can solve the "problem" of putting all the docs (disclosures, inspections, offer docs, title docs later on, etc) up with the listing along with making a network of handymen (to help out with prettifying a house for sale), most buyers and sellers will be happy to pay them 0.5-1% instead of the seller having to pay the agents 4-5%. There's generally not a whole lot of work in buying or selling a house includi…

This has been discussed ad nauseum by insiders to the industry for close to 10 years now. Nobody has yet pulled it all together, not for lack of trying, but because of the one major roadblock that you mentioned -- actually going to look at homes. Everything else can be put online, and most of it already is online in one form another, just not always through a single vendor.

I know I'm simply expanding on what you already said, but ... one way or another, you have to go look at a house that you intend to buy. And you don't want the seller there. So you need someone who is trusted by the seller to let you in.

If you can put together a service whereby someone other than real estate agents can do that task, then maybe you could gain traction on everything else.

But I have not talked to anybody who is interested in the work of automating everything else until the problem of physical access to homes is solved, because there isn't money in paperwork. The money in real estate comes from two sources - commissions and mortgages. And most marketing plans depend on reducing commissions, not just redirecting them to a new recipient. So it makes much more business sense to ignore the paperwork that agents normally do, and focus on the mortgage process than the inspection, title, closing process.

After all, that paperwork isn't a pain point for buyers or sellers - they don't do it anyway. The agents do. So the attitude becomes one of, "Who cares if an online service automates the paperwork, when you still needed that agent to open the door? Let the agent go do the paperwork, and at least do some work to earn their stupid commission."

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#105
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the local regulations, but yes, real estate has gone through quite a bit of regulatory capture. Might be possible to do an end-run via the same mechanisms that allow "for sale by owner".

> Might be possible to do an end-run via the same mechanisms that allow "for sale by owner". I can't speak universally for every state (there's 50 different sets of regulations, after all), but no. The carve out for FSBO is predicated on selling your own home. If you're facilitating the sale or rental of someone else's home, it triggers the licensing requirements.

Not what I mean. There are several services that provide materials and kits for doing such a sale; Zillow could let the owner control the sale, but provide services to the owner rather than sitting in the middle.

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#106
post #86
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could try Listhub, but they charge. Any other source would most likely not be legally obtained.

Listhub has its own problems -- specifically when MLS'es update data, Listhub has to ensure that all of the applications that use its data are updating their information as well. Listhub is also one HUGE xml file that is a pain in the ass to process. (We explored with a python based parser that chunked the file up into smaller listings and then imported that into Elasticsearch; but ultimately gave up and resorted int…

I'm curious, did you look into streaming XML parsing, StAX-style? It's not hard to process infinitely-long files with constant memory: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9809469/python-sax-to-lxm...

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Otoh, are the very best agents going to work for rf and make less money? Redfin looks like modern KW to me. Most great agents don't want to undersell their own industry. And while there are many markets where a mediocre agent will do, I wouldn't take that chance in sf, la, Nyc, Miami, etc

Would I use them to sell? Maybe. Would I use them to buy? Most definitely. As mentioned further down in this thread, buyer's agents have every incentive for the buyer to pay as high a price as possible (due to RE commission structure). I want someone earning a fee on my transaction because they got me the best price (as either buyer or seller). Price of a service can be a form of signaling, but paying more for someth…

Depends on the market. In a competitive market, I want my agent to be as dedicated as possible, not one taking a smaller cut. We won a 13-offer bidding war on a financed deal with only a SLIGHTLY higher price than the 2nd place, all-cash offer. anything could have made the difference in the deal, and I'm more than happy to throw another 10k at the agent to have it locked down.

You're right that traditional agents have incentives to get the highest price, but so does a Redfin agent.

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#108

> So as not to violate Zillow.com’s terms of service we have done so manually (hence the limited number of cities). Can sites have a legally enforceable terms of service that ban automated access? I understand if the automated traffic is high and impacts server performance and cost, but they can ban it even if it's limited? I understand sites need to protect their servers, but if it's publicly accessible and the traf…

A better question: Can they back up a Cease and Desist on a blog post based on data you've already gathered, through automated access that may have broken the TOU?

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#109
post #71

If Zillow can solve the "problem" of putting all the docs (disclosures, inspections, offer docs, title docs later on, etc) up with the listing along with making a network of handymen (to help out with prettifying a house for sale), most buyers and sellers will be happy to pay them 0.5-1% instead of the seller having to pay the agents 4-5%. There's generally not a whole lot of work in buying or selling a house includi…

This has been discussed ad nauseum by insiders to the industry for close to 10 years now. Nobody has yet pulled it all together, not for lack of trying, but because of the one major roadblock that you mentioned -- actually going to look at homes. Everything else can be put online, and most of it already is online in one form another, just not always through a single vendor. I know I'm simply expanding on what you alr…

> I know I'm simply expanding on what you already said, but ... one way or another, you have to go look at a house that you intend to buy. And you don't want the seller there. So you need someone who is trusted by the seller to let you in.

So... I am not familiar with this problem. But what about drones to fly inside and snap pics?

Re: What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

#110
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all a great idea - but state laws wouldn't permit it (I work in the industry). Most of the features you described, and the fee structure associated with them, would be in violation of real estate licensing laws. Hence why no one has provided a modern, competitive alternative to real estate brokers: you simply can't under the current regulatory regime. Otherwise, what you've described would almost certainly al…

> This is all a great idea - but state laws wouldn't permit it (I work in the industry). Uber, AirBnB redux. Provide a service that people want more than one built on cronyism-type relations between entrenched industry and gov't, and the change happens even with the existing law base. It's not like it's some secret as to how the laws got there in the first place.

Uber worked because you can be sneaky and give people rides without the government knowing about it. You can't be sneaky about buying and selling homes.
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