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

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

#121

Post by ramenmeal »

smackfu wrote: post #84
meritt wrote: post #55

Zillow has substantially mitigated the loss of Move.com/Realtor.com by forging direct relationships with numerous MLSs since the cutoff in April. > Since January, more than 300 MLSs have signed agreements to send listings directly to Zillow and Trulia, providing their members access to the largest audience of home shoppers on mobile and Web 1. http://investors.zillowgroup.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID... The sampli…

The problem is that if the MLS that covers your area didn't make a deal with Zillow, the overall stats don't really matter. Zillow will be useless for house shopping.

They can still get listings from brokerages.

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

#122

Post by pnathan »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #83
bcg1 wrote: post #61

Sold my house this summer. My wife listed the house on Zillow and took nice looking pictures and put a good description. We also paid a real estate agent $300 to list our house in the MLS (and we would handle the rest of the sale). Once our listing was in the MLS Zillow brought in the crapified compressed JPEGs from the MLS feed and overwrote our description etc, and locked us out from further edits. Fail. Zillow is…

You just listed all the reasons Redfin ( https://www.redfin.com ) is killing it. Their value proposition is that their agents aren't paid on commission, they're paid on your satisfaction. Their website is also very data-intensive compared to MLS sites (which create information asymmetry between buyers, sellers, and brokers due to how they're setup).

Redfin is a good setup.

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

#123

Post by drewmeyers24 »

rconti wrote: post #107
toomuchtodo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Buyers agency doesn't exist in many other countries

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

#124

Post by vitd »

kanzure wrote: post #109
codingdave wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That doesn't tell you things like, "man it smells musty in here. I bet there's a leak somewhere!" or "when I'm downstairs and my spouse is upstairs, the noise when they walk around is unbelievable!"

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

#125

Post by JamesBarney »

aggieben wrote: post #114
rdtsc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAR is a strong lobby, they will fight tooth and nail to keep their position. Million + realtors are betting their livelihood on having a hold on buying and selling homes, and are not going to let that go easily. Here is allegedly their letter to the president in 2011 (not related to Zillow but basically how they can throw their weight behind issues): http://www.ksefocus.com/billdatabase/clientfiles/172/3/1359.... At…

There will never be a deal. NAR's prosperity absolutely depends on their exclusive control of market access. Professional licensing is the single reason why this market sucks donkey balls. This is also why I would heartily support a total deregulation of real-estate-related professional licensing. It simply isn't that complex a task, and it doesn't really require much training to be competent at most transactions - a…

While I'm usually against certification, I don't think one weeks worth of studying and a $300 fee is a huge barrier to entry to be able to oversee a $300,000 transactions and have unrestricted access to 70% of houses on the market.

I don't think the market would change much if this barrier was removed. The median realtor is only $38,000 a year.

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

#126

Post by drewmeyers24 »

aggieben wrote: post #112
kanzure wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The problem is not one of physically opening doors. The issue is one of trust. Having drones opening doors instead of an agent doesn't really solve that problem - not to mention that lots of people wouldn't go for that.

Pretty much every startup is trying to solve trust. If you don't have trust, you ultimately don't have a business. It's a touch nut to crack/scale.

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

#127

Post by hoka »

imroot wrote: 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…

yep, and even something as 'simple' as images is difficult. If an image gets removed from the feed, it typically must be removed from the listing page. Tons of little things like this make the data incredibly prickly.

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

#128

Post by mooreds »

nosuchthing wrote: post #113
encoderer wrote: post #90

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

What differentiates real estate agents in terms of "skill"? It seems like their access to information of products available for sale would be the only useful service a from a real estate company. Of course, granted knowledge of which houses are available, helping the buyer find something they like is important but could this not be done with a google street view type system?

Here's what differentiates realtors.

   * negotiation (they negotiate tens of deals a year, as opposed to your negotiating one every few years--they should know the ins and outs of all the levers of a real estate contract)
   * property valuation/neighborhood knowledge (the school lets out and a crowd of slouching teenagers walks through here every day/this street isn't plowed by the city/etc).
   * access to inventory (some agents will have access to extra houses because of past clients)
The agency problem can be dealt with if you have an agent who wants your business and knows that the LTV of a happy customer is higher than the money he can get from putting you in a house you don't want.

The harder problem is selection--buyers/sellers tend to shop on referral or cost because, like any other profession, laymen have a hard time judging competency.

Source: I worked for a real estate brokerage as a software developer for a number of years.

[edit: formatting--geez, when can we get markdown here :) ]

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

#129

Post by w4 »

codingdave wrote: post #117
w4 wrote: 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…

Sure you can. I can quit claim my house over to you with no regulations impacting me at all. There are certainly valid reasons not to do so. Not the least of which being that if the person quitting the title claims didn't actually hold a clear title, then no ownership will actually transfer. But if you think that it is illegal to bypass the processes, then you are too caught up in the processes.

> Sure you can. I can quit claim my house over to you with no regulations impacting me at all... if you think that it is illegal to bypass the processes, then you are too caught up in the processes.

You're talking about something totally different than I am here. Selling your own home is a distinct concern from facilitating others in the sale of their home in exchange for payment. The latter cannot be done without following state licensing regulations, which is what I'm talking about above.

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

#130

Post by w4 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #105
w4 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ah, gotcha. I misunderstood what you meant. You can definitely offer limited services and advertising. You just have to be very careful not to engage in any activities the state might construe as creating an agency relationship, or that are specifically reserved for licensed agents.
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