What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by chrisan » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 11:13 PM UTC

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…

Supposedly in January there will be a new "standard" so vendors can stop mapping individual MLS fields

http://www.realtor.org/policy/mls-policy/real-estate-transac...

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

#132

Post by rgbrgb » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 11:55 PM UTC

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…

Congrats on the sale!

You could argue that "Zillow is going about this all wrong" if their goal was trying to improve the process of buying and selling homes or if they were trying to make it more affordable to buy a home. What you have to realize is that they have a business that's working very well within the real estate status quo: agents pay them money for ads to get leads, agents who are able to convert leads make a ton from commission, the cycle continues. A public company with an established business model (that prints money!) is not going to pivot and suddenly compete with their well-paying customers.

However, I totally agree that there's a huge opportunity to improve the buying/selling experience and lower transaction costs. My team is working extremely hard on that problem.

Edit: I should note that Zillow has done tremendous work on improving the home shopping process and I'm definitely not trying to knock them on that. They and their competitors have brought the shopping process online and given consumers access to listing info that was previously only available to agents. The actual offer/transaction (the buy button) is the extremely complicated piece we're trying to tackle. It just so happens that in tackling that piece and becoming a brokerage, we get access to a high quality broker-only data feed.

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

#133

Post by dang » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 12:31 AM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #101

dang wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Clever! May try that.

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

#134

Post by takee » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 12:52 AM UTC

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…

Wait a sec. When you say you paid the realtor $300 to put the listing on MLS, do you mean that you used the realtor only for that service? Or was this in addition to the other services that a typical realtor generally provides?

I am trying to understand how easy it is to go about selling your house on your own using zillow etc, while saving on the sale commission etc that a realtor would have made otherwise.

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

#135

Post by Scoundreller » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 12:56 AM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #110

jpmattia wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But the real estate agent serves little legal function. I'm not sure if their name will appear on any government document for a real estate transaction.

I see little difference between: A) Hiring a real estate agent to sell my home; and B) Selling it myself while hiring:

1) a photographer to take/post my pictures 2) an answering service to answer a throwaway phone number I create; and 3) a tour guide that does not even know their way around

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

#136

Post by gshx » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 12:59 AM UTC

vitd wrote: post #124

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?

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!"

A lot of the agents typically don't point out any of those things anyway. They're incentivized to make the deal and really paid by the Seller. If both the Buyer and Seller were paying, that might be an altogether different story and it might actually work out better. Having gone through the buying/selling process a few times, I would much rather deal with an unbiased automated system.

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

#137

Post by tacon » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 1:00 AM UTC

takee wrote: post #134

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…

Wait a sec. When you say you paid the realtor $300 to put the listing on MLS, do you mean that you used the realtor only for that service? Or was this in addition to the other services that a typical realtor generally provides? I am trying to understand how easy it is to go about selling your house on your own using zillow etc, while saving on the sale commission etc that a realtor would have made otherwise.

Yes, that is about right for a bare MLS listing and the agent withdraws from the sale. How to find such brokers? Just attend one of your local real estate investor meetings and they will tell you who can help. Such brokers might even be at the meeting.

This started to irritate the brokers in Texas a few years ago, so TAR got the legislature to change the real estate licensing statute to include a line about "minimum professional services". Oddly, that hasn't really slowed down this practice as far as I can see. The shadow broker does need to answer calls from other brokers/agents, as they can get quite testy when they find themselves talking directly to the seller. But they soon hand over the contact and move on.

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

#138

Post by Shu_snafu » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 1:03 AM UTC

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…

BuildZoom just updated their numbers to county vs county comparisons that get around the problem of inconsistent geographical boundaries in some cities.

The story remains.

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

#139

Post by aggieben » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 1:57 AM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #125

aggieben wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$300 fee? No, my friend. If you buy something on MLS, you pay at least half of a 6% commission on that $300k, for a cool $18,000 (if you have an easygoing seller, that is) How's that for a barrier to entry?

And yah - the market would revolutionize overnight* because without professional licensing suddenly MLS becomes just one of many sources of data - and judging by the technology of MLS, a quickly irrelevant one.

* - I exaggerate: it would take at least a fortnight.

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

#140

Post by speby » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 2:13 AM UTC

kelukelugames wrote: post #118

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

Oh boy, this is my time to shine. I just left Redfin for a new job and had to explain to my co workers why Redfin is able to offer a lower rate without sacrificing service. 1. Real estate agents spend a lot of time prospecting. In fact, the spend most of their time looking for customers instead of closing deals. The typical work week might be 30 hours of prospecting and 10 hours of actually working on a deal. 2. The…

Regarding #5, that simply just doesn't make sense. There are "best agents" who spend most of their time buying and selling in homes in the 250K-500K range because they have a knack for doing it efficiently and in volume. It is a huge mistake to think that just because an agent only deals in "luxury homes" that they are a better or more capable agent than one who does volume in lower-priced homes.

As well, buyers and sellers in the luxury market are also more challenging to deal with because of very specific parameters and various exceptions that make doing deals more specialized (i.e. it is more difficult to compare House A to House B when both are $2.5MM each).