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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

#151

Post by aggieben »

URSpider94 wrote: post #143
aggieben wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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. *…

He's referring to the cost to become licensed as a professional Realtor, at which point you can sell your own home.

You can sell your own home without a license. He was referring to the "cost of entering the MLS market" (my paraphrase) being a mere $300 (for having an agent list the sale). My point is that's not true because any actual sale costs an additional 6% of the transaction.

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

#152

Post by cplease »

Scoundreller wrote: post #135
nsxwolf wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

How are you going to find buyers and get the best price in most markets without listing and offering commission split to the buyer's broker?

The second someone unlicensed starts to regularly interface with other agents, they will get ratted out and stomped on. If you don't interface with other agents, then you are excluding most of the market.

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

rgbrgb wrote: post #132
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 ma…

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by Scoundreller »

cplease wrote: post #152
Scoundreller wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

How are you going to find buyers and get the best price in most markets without listing and offering commission split to the buyer's broker? The second someone unlicensed starts to regularly interface with other agents, they will get ratted out and stomped on. If you don't interface with other agents, then you are excluding most of the market.

Mostly I was trying to highlight how Uber and Airbnb take a monetary-intermediary approach, while the entire RE industry sits out of the actual transaction itself.

This is probably why I trust the average Airbnb host/Uber driver more than the average RE.

As a buyer, I was never "found". Without representation, I would seek the listing agents directly and have them give the tour. I figure the listing agent would be very eager to earn a bonus/double commission from their selling client, perhaps to my benefit even though I have no exclusive with them.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

codingdave wrote: post #104
gshx wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by meritt »

Shu_snafu wrote: post #138
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.

BuildZoom is utterly incompetent. Take a look at this: http://imgur.com/a/X2ajc

Notice how Baltimore County, MD includes Baltimore + the county on Realtor.com (8,579 properties) and Baltimore County, MD on Zillow does not include the city itself? 4523 vs 8579 is indeed ~52.7%.

However when you include Baltimore, MD on Zillow too? An additioanl +4211 listings.

(4523 + 4211) = 8734 VS 8579.

Seriously BuildZoom. Get your shit together. You are still not comparing the same areas!

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

#157

Post by beggi »

novaleaf wrote: post #145
toomuchtodo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

i bought a house on redfin (my 2nd house) and if you are willing to put in time to scout out your house, it's a good cash savings. (which, probably you should, since you are going to live in it!) I ended up touring maybe 15 houses. Reasonably sure that the house we got was the best deal out of them too.

Are you talking about the 2.5% they split with you or are there other ways to save with Redfin?

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

#158

Post by bcg1 »

rgbrgb wrote: post #132
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 ma…

You make excellent points. I guess what I meant was that Zillow's model _should be_ to improve the process and to make it cheaper. Maybe 6%-7% commission is still appropriate for high-end properties that only have a limited pool of potential buyers (that's not my world, I don't really know) but for average homes in 2015, it is an anachronism left over from a time when buyers and sellers couldn't do a lot of the legwork themselves online. Its not hard to see that there is a ton of money to be made closing that gap.

Just perused your website and from what I read your company certainly seems to have the right idea. As it happens our buyer did end up having an agent and we paid that agent a 3% commission, so from what I read your system definitely could have worked in our transaction and saved our buyer some dough. The $300 we paid the agent to get us into the MLS truly paid off though... we saved literally thousands. Looking back I could pay triple that and it would be a no-brainer. Just something to consider - toss in some boilerplate forms or instruction guides or whatever and it could be a great product with excellent margins. I bet theres a bunch of tech savvy go getter millenials that would get licensed to do the local work necessary. Anyhow, I'm really glad to see someone doing what you're doing, best of luck to you... I truly hope you win

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

#159

Post by rgbrgb »

bcg1 wrote: post #158
rgbrgb wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

You make excellent points. I guess what I meant was that Zillow's model _should be_ to improve the process and to make it cheaper. Maybe 6%-7% commission is still appropriate for high-end properties that only have a limited pool of potential buyers (that's not my world, I don't really know) but for average homes in 2015, it is an anachronism left over from a time when buyers and sellers couldn't do a lot of the legwo…

Really appreciate the kind words. We'll do our best!

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

#160

Post by lobster_johnson »

chrisan wrote: post #131
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...

Link doesn't work -- do you have another source?
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